


Heelstone

by fluorescentgrey



Series: Source Codes [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Conspiracy, Evil Dumbledore, M/M, Obvious Real World Parallels, Remus Goes to Azkaban, Scotland, Wolfsbane, magical theory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-07
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-07-29 20:37:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 102,464
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7698577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1994: an Orkney island research grant, much history to unravel, and a fifteen-year conspiracy comes to a head.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

“Baby, I’ve been   
breaking glass in your room again. Listen.   
You’re such a wonderful person  
but you got problems.” 

— David Bowie, “Breaking Glass,” 1977

\--

** Eynhallow, Orkney, Scotland  
** _ September 1994 _

\--

The magical theory teacher at Coll School was one Professor Yates, a tall Indian woman in her early forties who arrived via Portkey with her sixth-year class of twelve diverse, international part-human students promptly at 10:30am on September the Second. Clearly she had had them straighten their soft grey uniforms and had instructed them to behave before their transportation because they clustered around her quietly, watching at Sirius and the ever-present seabirds with pale and suspicious eyes.

Yates was dressed like her students in a pale grey cloak emblazoned with a red C upon the breast fold but she also wore a neon fur of no animal Sirius recognized nor suspected to be real wrapped stylishly around her neck, and she was clad rather ineffectually for the summer mud in knee-high, work-worn boots of snakeskin. Her black stockings were running across the knee in a threadbare ladder which only served to make her look even more like some world-weary punk matriarch. She reached forward for Sirius's hand and when she took it and clasped it tightly her severe brow furrowed. 

Hers was the first group of students he had welcomed to the stone circle and the 12th century church on Eynhallow since arriving there just over two months previous. In the summer a few Muggles had wandered across the causeway to observe the church but they couldn't see the stone circle (it had been warded so heavily under the auspices of the Oxford magical theory department that layfolk could only feel an unsettling hollowness) and they quickly left despite Sirius's greetings and offers of tours.

“Yates,” said the professor; she had not let go of Sirius's hand, and she had fixed him directly in the eyes; hers were bright and stern with the soft yellowish tint about the irises connoting her lycanthropy. He could feel the cold metal of her rings against his palm. “Very good to meet you; I just read your piece on Muggle Instinctive Magic in Magical Theory Quarterly…” She swept her arm — her bracelets jingled — to indicate her students. A few had turned curiously toward the circle and beyond it the church and beyond it the minuscule and mildewy two-room cottage in which Remus was sleeping as he had been sleeping nearly constantly since their arrival by Portkey to the tiny island in the end of June. “We went over the questions for discussion before coming here,” said Professor Yates. “I think we'd like to wander then we can have a quick chat. They’re all quite well-versed in the canon and —” she looked around at her class with a charming mock imperiousness — “they were _supposed_ to have read your piece on stone circles before this trip…” 

Sirius and Yates wandered behind the students as they ran down the hill to the circle, divesting their gray robes in the afternoon warmth. “This is their first field trip ever,” she said. “I wish I could take fifth years but I’ve got no funding and I have to take the seventh years to Niaux so they’ll pass the N.E.W.T.” 

“Never much institutional respect for magical theory as a department…” 

Yates fixed him again. “None of the academic departments at Coll School have any funding. Transfiguration can’t get new hedgehogs for their damn pincushion thing. They’re just using old hedgehogs who dare I say have been through too much.” 

Sirius had in fact subsidized the trip (Portkey rental costs, student insurance, a Use Fee that was funneled to the Oxford program) with the stipend he had received from Dumbledore. He wasn’t sure Yates would like it brought up; after all these years he was still utterly clueless about where one needed to be tactful where one discussed money, and he had embarrassed himself altogether too many times. “Right,” he said. “I’m sorry.” 

“What for?” 

He debated telling her he had been responsible for the Hogwarts integration prospect back in ’87 but had lost. Instead he said, “It isn’t fair.” 

“Of course. None of it is. They’re brilliant but none of them will ever get to Oxford. In fact you’re the closest they’ll get to Oxford so you had better play the damn part… They better have all lived their very own _Brideshead Revisited_ before we leave here.” 

Down at the circle the students had broken up and spread out around the stones. A few were sitting on the ground contemplatively and others were pacing around the complete structure with their eyes closed, occasionally bumping into one another. Still others had walked over to investigate the ancient church, which wasn’t resonant but which was definitely interesting architecturally and purportedly historically if you were to believe the Orkney locals’ bloody legends. “I can do my best,” Sirius told Yates. “Cup of coffee?” 

When she accepted — “Black and sweet, please” — Sirius went down the hill into the cottage to fetch it. Since the event in June he hadn’t been able to summon much of any magic at all but in August when school groups started asking for trips to the Eynhallow site (including the new magical theory professor at Hogwarts, who had been one of Sirius’s first fifth year students) he and Remus, together with a great deal of fortification from the resonance of the stone circle, had been able to Disillusion the open doorway into the bedroom. Dumbledore had warned that though Pettigrew was in Ministry custody his arrest would likely have to be kept a secret for “security reasons;” it meant Remus was no longer in danger from MLE or Dementors (though both were still circling the Scottish countryside, presumably also for security reasons) but there was always the possibility of vigilantes. Sirius was accustomed to his students wandering where they shouldn’t and there was nowhere else to hide on the island, which they had been instructed not to leave. “For your safety,” Dumbledore had said, and he had tried to put a hand on Remus’s shoulder, but Remus had flinched away. 

Through the doorway into the bedroom the spell was such that the bed looked empty, and the pale daylight came in through the window upon the ratty comforter, but either Remus was sleeping or otherwise “reading” Heller’s _Catch-22_ by staring unfocusedly at the same page for several hours. Sirius poured three cups of coffee and pushed the third just over the threshold through the cool damp veil of the Disillusionment charm into the bedroom, and the other two he brought outside for himself and Indra, who had started checking in on her students one by one. Most of them had sat near the circle or inside it in what the prevailing literature called the Yorke Position for Resonance Absorption (cross-legged, eyes closed, hands pressed to the ground) but a few stood further back toward the church, sketching in notebooks or scrying with their eyes closed. Sirius was impressed; at Hogwarts he had never managed to keep twelve in his sixth year class let alone twelve who clearly knew their stuff, and he knew the enrollment numbers at Coll School were much lower. 

Yates stood up, knees cracking, from one student’s side and accepted her mug. She had slung her fur over one shoulder and despite her cacophony of necklaces he could see the gouging bite mark scar at her neck. It was so very like Remus’s it could not have been coincidence. She fixed him for a second; she was expecting him to say something, but he couldn’t tell what. When she turned away from him to check on a few more students he thought he saw a grim smile settle in the corner of her mouth. 

After another twenty minutes or so she corralled them all and they sat together inside the circle in the Yorke Position. “Can you tell us a little about the history of this site, Professor Black?” Yates asked, pressing her hands tightly to the earth. 

“Of course, well, the circle was put up just before Skara Brae, the Neolithic village, which I wish I could take you to but it’s overrun by Muggle tourists. Scholars think it’s among the oldest henges in Britain — it’s just older than Stenness on the Orkney Mainland. The Muggle method of carbon dating puts it at about 3200 BC. It also has one of the most potent resonances that magical theory scholars know about, at least in the UK, which is why Muggles think this island is a bird sanctuary. The church is from the twelfth century AD but they are certainly connected. Many churches, monasteries, other sorts of Christian prayer sites were built at resonant monuments around that time… Does anybody think they might have an idea why?” 

A black boy with very sharp teeth shot his hand up with a fervor that reminded Sirius of Hermione Granger. “Bringing resonant sites sort of forcefully under Christian oversight… contextualizing them appropriately for the religious zeitgeist.” 

“Perfect,” said Sirius. “It was a very complicated time for wizarding faith systems and given the fragile political situation in the sub-Roman period not to mention the Middle Ages’ taste for witch hunting there was all sorts of attempted assimilation around when this church was built. Some scholars think the wizarding genome evolved squibness in this historical moment as a kind of defense mechanism… to keep the ability in the blood for a safer time.” 

A pretty girl with lank black hair and skin a brown-grayish raised her hand. “We learned in our summer reading about magical DNA,” she said; her voice was soft and seemed to echo, like an eerie lullaby. Her hair was too dark for Veela so Sirius thought she was probably a kelpie. “I’m just — I’m kind of confused about how resonance like this is related.” 

“Think of it like, the way you have magical DNA, this place has resonance. It’s a thread that connects all sorts of things… so maybe we should approach it like that. Have you guys all done instinctive magic before — like maybe in a time when you were feeling really stressed or scared, and something just burst and you did a spell without meaning to?” The kids nodded, and so did Yates. “Well, the capability to do instinctive magic is in all human DNA. It’s underneath even the thing that makes us magic. Even Muggles can sometimes do magic instinctively though they don’t understand it that way. So the general concept or theory is that at one time all humans could use resonant places like this one to perform magic through ritual. And probably from that, we evolved the capability to do instinctive magic — like, sometimes we would need to use magic far from resonant places, so those humans who could had an evolutionary advantage. That ability then strengthened and coalesced into what we consider magical DNA. A few changes and mutations happened, evolution, if you will, and then this split happened between those with magical DNA and those without.” 

“So resonance gave us the ability to do magic,” said Yates, looking around at her students. 

“That’s the theory. A good proof for it is, sometimes wizards and witches can’t feel resonance. Do you have classmates who can’t feel resonance?” A few of the students nodded. “One of my best ever students can’t feel resonance,” Sirius said. “The theory around that is quite simply, she’s a product of evolution. Theoretically because we have magical DNA, we don’t need to be able to use resonance to do magic. It’s an evolutionary holdover that we can. And it’s evolving out of our genome.” He smiled at the kelpie girl. “That was a really good question.” 

“What about us,” said another student. “We have magical DNA but we also have… I mean, we’re not all the way human.” 

“Well,” said Sirius, “it’s not so well-understood, because it’s under-studied. Which is why it’s wonderful that you all are taking magical theory. You do have full human DNA — otherwise you would not look like humans. Merfolk have a couple mutations, vis a vis the tail and the gills, et cetera. And you also have full magical DNA, some of you with mutations which allow you to perform certain magics. Kelpies for example; the power of persuasion or compulsion is a special mutation. Meanwhile vampirism and lycanthropy are almost like viruses which are introduced through contagion and mutate DNA. Make sense?” 

“Is all that connected to resonance?” 

“It might be… certainly there is a great argument for kelpie magic, because some of the resonant sites do have compulsions of their own. There are no good theories about vampirism and lycanthropy, in my experience; the prevailing argument is a kind of spell damage gone wrong, like a curse or a Frankenstein-y god complex situation, which I can’t really buy into. No one’s bothered tracing either condition to a kind of patient zero, as it were; most folks simply leave it all up to mythology and legend.” 

How to look someone in the face and tell them, you are special and you are new and different, and the strange things about you people fear because they don’t understand, or because they remind them of weaknesses in themselves, and as such it isn’t your fault, but you will be made to feel like it is, probably every second of your life. 

“Shall we try a little digging, then?” Sirius asked. 

The students rearranged how they were sitting and pressed their hands to the earth again with the elbows just bent and they bowed their heads and closed their eyes. Yates corrected a few postures, then she did the same; so did Sirius. “We’re just going to try to go in and map it just a bit,” he said, “and if you don’t feel right, just come right out. Alright?” 

Together they went deep as though in a sort of elevator shaft into a cave. The resonance here always felt like a sort of room underground in which there was illegible writing on the walls and something behind you, hovering at your shoulder, no matter which way you turned; not so much a threat as an inevitability, a tender closeness that would one day swallow you up. They stayed in for ten minutes or so and he felt the students wander inside it as they had wandered outside it and not one of them pulled back until Sirius and Yates did. He supposed they had nothing to fear in it; they were used to being watched, to being surveilled and considered, and they understood inevitability, and they understood some things were directed by fate or another larger influencer. When they opened their eyes again he watched their pupils refocus in the light and they laughed and spoke rapidly amongst themselves with expanding gestures. 

Yates stood, brushing grass off her skirt. “That was lovely,” she said, smiling in a refreshed way, as though she were talking about a vacation. “They’ve never gone so deep before.” 

“It’s definitely different in situ,” Sirius explained, “you can only reach so far with an artifact…” 

Together they corralled the students back up the hill toward the Portkey. “It means a lot to them to see someone like you successful and sharing with them,” Yates said. “It validates all their curiosity and it gives them a sort of role model if you will… Though honestly I am quite curious to know how you ended up teaching at Hogwarts after all that.” 

“After all what?” 

“Don’t they have silver in the ground?” 

Dread diffusing like cream in coffee. “Indeed they do.” 

“Well it must have been difficult to teach there, with all that, is what I’m saying.” 

The students were on top of the hill looking out over the fields and the beach and the coast with dramatic gestures and others were peering across the strait toward the Broch of Gurness, and Yates had fixed Sirius with the most demanding and curious of all the looks she had leveled at him since her arrival. “I’m not — ” Sirius tried. “I’m not a werewolf.” 

Yates’s eyebrow cocked halfway up her forehead. _Fuck,_ Sirius thought. “You’re not?” 

“No.” 

“I had a feeling like you were one of — like we shared a master.” 

_Oh fuck, fuck fuck._ “We don’t. I’m sorry.” 

“I’m not,” she said. Slowly, curiously, devastatingly, she looked down the hill across the henge and the church toward the cottage. “I wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy.” 

“Professor Yates,” called one of the students. They all had hooked a finger into a hunk of Muggle fishing net which must’ve been their Portkey. “We have like thirty seconds I think.” 

Yates presented her beringed hand for Sirius to clasp again. “Well thank you for everything I suppose.” 

“Likewise.” 

She gave him one more grim smile then she went and grasped an edge of the fishing net and went over her students with a quick head count, and then they all waved pleasantly until they disappeared. 

\--

What happened in the Shack in June:

Remus took the rat carefully from the dog’s jaws and held it throttlingly while Sirius took the dog off, head swimming, magic swimming, everything swimming, and he felt on the verge of shattering or perhaps just beyond it, and Remus smelled like dust, and he looked the same except gouged away. The same except completely hollowed from the inside and collapsing like a mined-out landscape. He wore his skin and bones and his stained stolen ill-fitting clothes like a sort of accessory to his soul of which only the edge of vengeance remained intact. The pale golden rime of resonance about him was like a debris field around a dying star and the very old scars stood out vividly on his face and neck and arms, like a map to nowhere, like a map of whatever paths connected inside his scrambled mind… 

It was not the time to talk or even think about anything besides the matter immediately and literally at hand. “Can you do _Hominem Revelio_?” Remus asked. His voice was broken and strange. “If I hold him — will you do it?” 

The first sign that something was afoot was that he did the spell without even thinking it, and without so much as touching his wand; there was a crack and a flash of pale light, and then there was the not-dead man who was the rat, who had spent altogether too much time in that sinuous and compressed body: pale and balding, with overlarge yellow front teeth, and he scrambled on hands and knees toward the door but Remus stepped hard upon his hand. The fingernails had grown out in grotesque yellow clawlike curls. This man — the alleged martyr and sacrifice who had been neither after all — upheld as a doomed hero and honored posthumously with decorations from every department in the Ministry and wept over endlessly in courtrooms and boardrooms and the _Prophet_ whose memory was sanctified as evidence incontrovertible…

“There he is,” said Remus mildly, like he was playing peekaboo with a baby. The heel of his shoe pressed hard into the back of Peter’s hand, and his eyes were bright and cold, and Sirius could hear him breathing. “Secret Keeper.” 

It fell like a stone from a height into water and then it sunk and was silent and Sirius understood. Everything had been set up like dominos; everything had been put into a neat little line. Arranged like a historical diorama in a museum. It altogether made a lot of sense when he looked at it — this was the missing link that had been keeping him awake nights, possessed by doubt, since November 1981, in the days he wouldn’t so much as close his eyes fearing he would dream as he had before that he himself was in Azkaban. Peter was stuttering some scarcely comprehensible melange of their names watching between them at Remus’s murderous stillness (a guillotine strung up, his eyes unblinking, the moon drawing at him) and the realization Sirius knew was spreading like dawn on his own face… He thought he would be sick. It was as bad as the false realization had been because accompanying it was the same sensation that he had been very very dearly wrong. 

At last Remus crouched; his knees cracked loudly. “Do you know what’s going to happen when the moon comes up?” he asked Peter, silencing the babbling. Slowly fading in the window was the deep grey evening. “I’m going to eat you,” Remus said, eerily calm. “I’ve always wanted to.” 

He remembered what Dumbledore had said — there isn’t much human left to him. But Remus’s shoulders were very tight, and his eyes were stretched wide and his hands were shaking. “Please,” Peter said, coherentish at last, “Sirius — ” 

He reached for the toe of Sirius’s boot and Sirius stepped back. Like away from spreading nuclear sludge. “He won’t stop me,” said Remus. “Think about what you’ve done to him.” 

“Remus, you were never — ” Peter’s voice was very high and loud and bright with panic. “You were never the same, when you came back from France! Something had a hold on you and I had — I needed to do, what must be done, to save, to save the child…” 

Remus’s hand struck like a snake and wrapped Peter’s throat and for the first time Sirius saw the tattoo on Remus’s forearm — a crooked and smudged rendition of the famous aerial map of Stonehenge by Montgomery and Locust, down to the crossbars and the heelstone, stretching across one of the many tearing ’78 bite marks. “Do not speak about the child you sold to Voldemort to save your fucking skin,” Remus said, and his face was very close to Peter’s, like he would go for the bright and slamming jugular vein with his teeth. The skeletal hand pressed in with its full weight beneath the limp and fleshy chin and cheeks and Sirius saw Remus’s knuckles were tattooed also, the same symbology, over and over, the nearly-closed circle that when found in tea leaves meant _do not disturb_. “I know you set up that thing that had a hold on me and so I want to know how long.” He glanced behind him into the window. “I think you’ve got about ten minutes.” 

A big tear rolled down Peter’s mottled cheek. “They came calling — Bellatrix came calling, that autumn, ’78, September or October. She said, well you know what she can do with _Crucio_. They just wanted, Remus they wanted names. So all I gave her was just, just your names.” 

“ _Just_?” 

“She asked — who were my friends at school.” 

Like the first fallen stone. Inside him Sirius’s magic felt like something burning on a pyre. They had found a weak spot and they had found two scapegoats to keep the spot weak. Everything had compounded from there and now it was still compounding. Sirius remembered Greyback’s assertion in the court documents that he had corresponded with Bellatrix. She would’ve delighted in Sirius’s misery; she had since they were children. 

“I would’ve died before I gave you up,” said Remus. The most unsettling thing was how calm his voice. “I gave up a weapons arsenal instead of you. To think I wondered why you didn’t come to visit me in the hospital.” 

Sirius looked in the window. Perhaps they had five minutes now til moonrise. “Moony,” he said; Remus flinched, then he looked up. “Let’s get you in the woods. I’ll take Peter to the castle.” 

“Whyever would you want to do a thing like that.” 

“If we turn him in — his life is proof you’re innocent. We could get you a pardon from the Ministry.” Even as he said it he knew it was a long shot. Remus’s face twisted and he looked away. “Moony,” he tried again, “please — ” 

“After they kiss me you’ll have to kill Greyback,” Remus said, standing. “He’s in the South of France.” 

Then Peter laughed. Perhaps he tread so close to death he no longer cared. Sirius knew he had a cruel streak; he had seen it before, rarely, but he had seen it, usually when they were drunk, and Peter, fed up likely with their bullshit, said something cutting about how James wouldn’t ever get Lily and anyway who would want her, given Snape. “I wonder about the tact,” he said then, “Remus. Sending one of your old lovers to kill the other.” 

Measuredly Remus turned toward him. There was just enough animalness about it to be frightening. 

“There was some talk,” Peter went on. He was watching at the fading light in the window. “I will admit — shortly after, about how quickly you bent over. Even after all you made poor Sirius wait.” 

Sirius’s heartbeat was in his throat and his ears hadn’t quit ringing for what seemed like hours. In school he had doubted Peter was smart enough to notice his and Remus’s sneaking off and conniving but apparently he’d picked up on it as he’d picked up on everything. Ever underfoot sneaking and sniffing and watching, ever like a rat. He could not bring himself to think closer to the other thing. For a moment he had allowed himself to believe this complete revelation meant it too had been a lie… 

“Was there really talk,” Remus said, crouching again. “All Voldemort’s finest sitting around the campfire chatting about how I fuck.” His voice was almost gone and the pain had started creeping up on him, Sirius could tell it in the set of his shoulders. He had been doing worse to himself for thirteen years and likely he had spent much of that time rehearsing this moment and nothing that could be said would crack him; he was like a sheet of unreflective metal. “No wonder he fled this mortal plane.” 

“Let me take him,” Sirius said, “Moony, for me, let me take him to the castle.” 

“You don’t have time,” Remus said. “Padfoot, there’s no — ” 

His back twisted and his nails dug into the floor. The light in the window changed. Then Sirius heard the sound from the door. When he looked up he saw the flash of Harry’s green eyes, and Ron’s vibrant shock of red hair. 

_Fuck._

He turned back to Peter in time to see the rat scamper into the darkness. The half-Remus thing at his feet screamed a howl of rage. In the hallway he heard Hermione’s fearful shriek. All the magic in the world was screaming through him like a strike of lightning and he couldn’t help it and he couldn’t breathe — 

Then it happened.

\--

When he came back inside from seeing the Coll School students off Remus was at the kitchen table with the cold cup of coffee Sirius had put inside the door to the bedroom an hour or so previous. He had made two pieces of nearly blackened toast in the cast iron skillet on the hotplate and he had scraped a bit of goat cheese across the top yet he had abandoned it after two bites. He wore plaid boxer shorts and Sirius’s Breeders t-shirt with an oversize multicolor carpet coat Sirius had found for him in a thrift shop on Mainland and were it not for his very thinness and the hollowness about his eyes which had not yet gone away he would have looked rather like a very hungover grunge sideman having ventured out warily from his bower of nausea and suffering. They had not managed to speak very much, because Remus was so perpetually exhausted that even on the full moons they had managed to playfight like old times all of ten minutes before he curled up under the kitchen table and fell asleep, and they did not take meals together because Remus said he couldn’t eat much, and though they were obliged to share the tiny island and the tiny house and even the tiny bed and sometimes Remus had bad night terrors it seemed neither of them could summon the chutzpah for any kind of explanation or apology. Which was not altogether surprising. 

“Alright?” Sirius asked, sitting down in the second chair. Remus had left him the good one, which he often did, for some reason; his squeaked and necessitated careful balance. 

“Fine,” Remus said; his eyes focused like a camera lens. “Where were they all from?” 

“Coll School. They’re all part-humans. Remember I told you — ”

“I remember.” He broke off another piece of the cold blackened toast and nibbled it like a large pathetic rabbit. “They all had a — on the breast of their robes.” 

“A letter C for Coll.” Remus had turned toward the door, which Sirius had left ajar to get the autumn breeze in, and he rested his chin and his mouth in his hand. There were goosebumps rising up on the inch or so of his wrist beyond the cuff of the carpet coat. “What’s wrong? We can close the door if you’re cold.” 

“It’s fine,” said Remus, but his voice sounded fragile, “you can leave it open, I’m not cold.” 

“They were very sweet,” Sirius said, rising to make more coffee, “and very smart, it was wild, you know, almost a little scary, how deep they got.” 

“Not much to be afraid of down there for them.” 

Together, in their first month on Eynhallow, they had sat together in the circle and reached down into the resonance, and when they came back up after maybe a half hour or so and opened their eyes: it was the first time he had seen Remus smile in thirteen years. Or perhaps longer, because in the end of it all of his smiles had been not so real, nervous and wary and hunted, and now sometimes at night Sirius lay awake imagining where all this orchestration had begun, and where it would end. Anyway there had not been another one since then, though he had tried. 

“Yes,” said Sirius. “That’s what I thought. They asked really good questions.” 

Remus watched curiously as Sirius made more coffee the Muggle way. That was another thing they had not discussed — why lately Sirius had not been able to do much magic. Previous summers he had had maybe one spell a day and yet now he had had none since the evening in the Shack in the end of June. He was trying very hard not to panic especially because in previous summers it had started brewing back up by the beginning of the school year. He took some heart in the fact that he could still feel resonance, and he could still put the dog on; it hurt desperately, though he didn’t think Remus had noticed that. 

“Are you going to write today,” Remus asked him, watching intently at the percolator. 

“I think. Are you back to bed?” 

Remus shook his head. “I need to try and eat. Then I want to try and swim.” Sirius furrowed his brow. These were massive and seemingly sourceless developments. “Will you come and watch me,” Remus went on, “swimming I mean, because I haven’t done it since, well for about a year, and I don’t know that I remember anything but breaststroke.”

They each had a cup of coffee and Remus finished the toast, then he had a few slices of salami, which was also miraculous, then they went down to the narrow and cold pebbly strip of beach, and Sirius sat with his notebook jotting down the better of the Coll School students’ questions from that morning and pretending he wasn’t watching Remus undress, which he had been pretending for two months when Remus changed for bed or put his clothes aside so he could transform. He felt a sort of awkward and cowering residual shame when he looked at Remus and felt desire; he was so thin and he had worn his body through battle after battle and what he needed was to be wrapped in a blanket and fed soup, not necessarily the vigorous yet tender fucking Sirius could not help imagining / remembering; it was the same body, after all, except Remus had marked it up in a few places with the do not disturb sigil, and some of it had evaporated or disappeared. 

Remus folded the Breeders shirt and the carpet coat and set them gently beside his towel on one of the beach boulders, and Sirius was struck by the thought that he must have done this in Azkaban. He had always been neat, and careful with his things; such a habit came of being raised poor, which Sirius did not at first understand. He watched Remus walk to the shore and wade in quickly without hesitation and when he was up to his waist he dunked under. Sirius watched him swim for a while and at last he waded in himself up to his ankles feeling the gentle current of the channel draw across his feet. Minnows moved in the shallows and spidery bugs and the sun cast a few rare rays deep enough to throw a kind of prism light into the green water. 

At the first clap of thunder distantly across the jewels of the islands and the channels and the stones they went back up to the cottage together and laid out buckets and mixing bowls in the few places where even Remus’s patching charms hadn’t helped the roof, and Sirius wrote a bit of the Treatise on Muggle Performance of Magic and after a little while Remus asked him for a quill and a piece of paper, and as it darkened and the rain began to fall they ate cheese and crackers and salami and drank cold coffee and they both wrote in silence but for the rain and the scratching of quills, and at last at the height of the thunderstorm when they had both looked up from their work (Remus had covered his page with his hands so Sirius couldn’t see what he had written) to watch the rain in the window and the shocks of brilliance the lighting spread across the fields shadowing the church and the henge and the sea there came a knock upon the door. 


	2. Chapter 2

The thunder had masked the crack of her apparition but Remus felt Indra’s arrival as he had felt it that morning when she and her students arrived via Portkey. He had woken earlier than usual thinking the strange thread of familiarity was a piece of a dream until he peered through the ragged lacy curtains and recognized on the hill with Sirius Indra’s height, her boots and her fur, and the contingent accompanying her in the grey robes emblazoned with the red letter C. Her fine dark hair had gone a bit grey and she had pulled it up in a tight chignon and in her heels she was taller even than Sirius who also had pulled his hair up, if less neatly. The sight of the children from the Oban facility in this other place was like a bucket of cold water dumped over his head. He had not felt so awake since the night in the shack with Peter but also he found he could not stop his hands shaking.

When the sensation of her presence returned he thought perhaps he was hallucinating, or he was in fact asleep and dreaming, as he had been for two months; he had made the mistake before. Then the knock upon the door, and Sirius looking at him with a blind panic. Not for the first time he wished he had had the fortitude to disclose some things in the silent months since their arrival on Eynhallow but he had suspected if he disclosed one matter he would have to disclose them all. And he would have to learn what the interim years had been like for Sirius which he was not entirely sure he could bear. 

The knock sounded once more upon the door, louder this time. “Black,” said Indra after a moment of breathless stillness, in which thunder clapped seemingly directly above. “I’m fucking soaked. Open the door.” 

Sirius gestured frantically into the Disillusioned bedroom but Remus was already halfway to his feet. He folded the sheet of paper Sirius had given him — he had been writing down everything he thought he understood so far in a kind of abstract flow chart — and tucked it into the breast pocket of his coat. Then he stood, and his chair grated upon the floor. Sirius grabbed his wrist tightly like a static shock and Remus found one of the many things he had forgotten was just how effective Sirius’s imploring face could be when he tried. You don’t have to go out tonight, Moony; Peter can do it, just owl him; you can stay in; we’ll be quick, early to bed, you know I have gotten so practiced and you're so easy, I think if I applied myself I could get you off in under thirty seconds… He had always fallen for it as he had fallen for any number of things, which was to say with his complete soul; he had been falling for that face since Oh Moony, you can do your homework later, we really ought to go for a little walk tonight, we really ought to map the dungeons… 

Of course he had to half-drag Sirius behind him to the door and there followed a brief scuffle in which Sirius managed to get half in front of him like to keep him from view or catch any wayward spells. In the crack Remus had managed to wedge his bare foot into painfully Indra regarded them with an eyebrow cocked, holding her cape over her head to keep her hair from the rain. “Evening gents.” 

“Evening, Yates,” said Sirius. He sounded very tired. “This here’s — ” 

Indra pushed the door open with the flat of her manicured hand and they both stepped back to let her inside. “We’re old friends,” she said. “Remus consulted me on his seventh year paper.” She had changed her school clothes into a rather more casual ensemble — Birkenstock sandals with grey wool socks and dark indigo jeans torn at the knee — and though she had kept her neon stole against the rain her lack of heels put her at just about Remus’s height. She moved for a moment like she was going to embrace him and he must’ve flinched, because her eyes changed a little, and instead she clasped his shoulder. “You could maybe read like a tiny bit of werewolf mythology,” she said, turning to Sirius. “You could’ve read Remus’s paper. Or maybe _my_ paper in Lycanthropy Theory Review on pack-sibling sensory recognition via magical resonance…”

“There’s a Lycanthropy Theory Review?” Remus asked her. 

“Yes well, there is now. It isn’t yet accredited,” she added, at Sirius’s look. 

“We were warned,” Sirius explained. “They can’t issue a pardon… political mumbo-jumbo. If someone found out — well they might, um, act rashly.” He offered Indra the chair in which he had been sitting. “Won’t you join us — I can scrounge up I think something to drink, a bit of Old Ogden’s, perhaps?” 

“I’ll have a bit,” Remus said, surprising himself, “just a bit, with water?” 

“Right,” said Sirius. “Professor?” 

“More than just a bit. And neat, please.” 

He sat across from Indra in the creaky chair. He had felt for at least two months and perhaps for years like he dwelled in this kind of liminal space between present and unpresent and sometimes he felt like he was an entire living thing made of memory and nostalgia, shaped from it like so much clay, and perhaps that was why he had spent two months sleeping; all the various and sundry that had to be reckoned out could not necessarily be reconciled with what he knew of the real and present world. Sirius had grown up; he was thirty-four, he was a scholar and a professor with the respect of his field, name recognition, published work in numerous accredited journals, he still wore his hair long, he had maintained his abiding taste for ostentatious thrift store clothing, though it seemed his definition of ostentatious had changed quite a bit over thirteen years; he looked handsome and fit and sly and cunning, which was to say much as he always had, except sometimes (and he took great pains to keep it from Remus) there was a shattered look in his eye or a falseness to his smile, as though it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen and dropped from a height. The parameters and the viscous history that did not so much keep Remus awake as crept up on him in his dreams they had not spoken about. He himself also was thirty-four, Sirius had reminded him, but sometimes he felt like he had lived forever, and sometimes he felt just born. Perhaps the latter was closer to accurate; he had indeed been recently delivered whole and screaming into this very changed and unfriendly world. 

Indra was studying him from across the table as Sirius prepared their drinks. “You look like death spat you out.” 

“I feel, yes, rather like — ” It took him a moment to assemble the metaphor. “Like a deer in a thresher.” 

He thought he felt blown apart from the very soul in some atavistic bang. As if parts of himself were still screaming outward and had not yet come to rest. Most days he couldn’t order much of the world or much of what had happened. It was like a jigsaw puzzle with its pieces tangled in with several others. Sometimes he wondered if it were possible to harness the henge’s resonance into healing his mind. 

Sirius brought the whiskeys to the table in teacups and gave Remus a pointed look he couldn’t decipher. Then he overturned the milk crate he kept most of his research paperwork in and sat on it so he was just about eye level with the table. His own teacup of whiskey he held in his hands to warm it; Remus understood (from watching Sirius writing at the kitchen table in the night) that he had become rather practiced at this in the interim years. 

“You know it has been a point of pride for us all that you survived there,” said Indra. “How many methods they have to break us and how many ways they have tried. But the worst of their places and the worst of their tools did not break you.” 

But it did, he almost told her. He didn’t want to say it where Sirius could hear. Instead he looked down into his teacup where Sirius had watered down his whiskey considerably, which was certainly for the best. 

“Half of the part-human community has been certain these thirteen years that you were framed as a scapegoat which I take it based on the present scenario is in fact reality,” Indra went on. “The other half are certain that you in fact did commit all those terrible crimes as a sort of heroic fuck-you to all of wizardkind. Which means you needn’t worry about potential assassinators from Coll School; regardless of their personal beliefs all of my students would have probably liked to shake your hand or throw you a parade.” 

“Can you tell us more about the Coll School?” Remus asked her, leaning forward over the table. He was aiming for a calm and measured rationality but wasn’t sure he remembered how to sound measured or rational. “Sirius told me a little when he said you were coming. But I — I think I need to talk to you about something.” 

Indra looked down to Sirius for a moment as though asking permission. Remus folded his hands before him on the table to keep from chewing his nails; he had discussed none of this with Sirius, which he probably should’ve; it had seemed like an undue burden, and it still was, but it explained a number of things, like half of his nightmares, and his utter lack of appetite, about which he suspected Sirius had spoken with Dumbledore. “I take it you already have some ideas,” Indra said. 

Remus unfolded the piece of paper from his front pocket and spread it out upon the table. He could see in his peripheral Sirius trying to eye it surreptitiously but he wasn't sure his handwriting was legible any longer. “More like, I want to make sure I’m not going crazy,” he told Indra. “I got out of Azkaban because they had this potion — ”

“Wolfsbane,” said Indra, “yes.” 

“You’ve seen it?” 

“I tried it just over a year ago. My sixth and seventh year werewolf students, those who were of age, they were offered an opportunity — I’d say this is around May or June, 1993 — to be paid to do a few trials of it. I wanted to try it first. To be sure it was safe before, before they tried it, because I knew — ” she took a swig from her teacup — “there were previous opportunities for previous potions and kids did not come back.” 

“Fuck,” said Sirius, loudly, ringing the silence, “oh, fuck,” and Remus wanted, bitter wildness, nothing more than to reach below the table and take his hand. As though there were anything even moderately reassuring left about his bones. As though there were anything left of him that could comfort someone else. He could see his own hands on the table clenched together so tightly his knuckles were white but he almost could not feel them. When he pulled them apart to pick up and wet his quill there was a warm rush of blood into the numbness. “Maybe,” he said, feeling his voice, pitchy and ragged, definitely neither measured nor rational, “can you tell us the whole story from your end, Indra?” 

She took another sip from her teacup before she began. “Coll School was founded in ’87 when the Hogwarts Board of Trustees voted rather closely that they would not allow any more part-human students to study there. A fifth-year student transferring from a school in America had applied to enroll at Hogwarts and she was the first since you, Remus.”

“Amelia Nguyen,” Sirius told them, remembering. “We heard her case. The measure to build Coll School passed by one vote.”

If Sirius had been at Hogwarts perhaps he had voted on the proposal — perhaps his had been the one vote. But these were ramifications for another time. Remus wrote the years and Amelia’s name on the back of the parchment. He no longer trusted his memory to retain what was necessary. 

“There was a land grant going that allowed the Ministry’s Department of Education to purchase several acres on the Hebridean island of Coll very cheaply. The school was built in time for the beginning of the ’88-’89 school year, and I was hired to teach magical theory. All the staff and board are part-humans, even the Headmaster, who’s a bit of a puppet…” 

‘“Who’s the Headmaster?” Sirius asked; he had always been good at questions; they had wanted him in interrogations in the Auror office in the late ‘70s because he knew it seemed instinctively where to lead narratives. It was one of many things about him Remus had started to consider suspicious after the Event but now he found himself immeasurably grateful; he wasn’t sure he himself could muster anything at all to ask Indra besides _why, why, why?_

“Maurice Piebald,” Indra answered, “he’s a vampire; he was Head of the Department of Part-Human Affairs at the Ministry for a while. Not many folks like his politics. He’s a bit self-hating and he refuses to drink human blood so he’s functionally bedridden. In my complete tenure at Coll School I’ve seen him all of thrice.” 

“And how did they get any students to come? That was one of our fears on the subject, at Hogwarts, that parents wouldn’t want to send children to somewhere new…” 

“There was an owl sent to the parents and guardians of every eligible part-human child aged 11 through 18, in all the United Kingdom and in Ireland… Plenty of folks just hadn’t bothered trying to send their kids to Hogwarts because they knew it would start a debate, especially after ’81, or they feared for their kids’ safety and were homeschooling them, which mine did, and my husband’s did. Most of them jumped at the opportunity, especially all the part-human halfway houses and foster homes, but a few were more difficult to track down and there was some legislation passed functionally mandating it. Namely to get Merfolk to send kids to the school… they’ve never been much inclined to just about anything standardized by the Ministry.”

Without prompting Sirius refilled Indra’s teacup and his own and condescended a splash into Remus’s which he had not yet touched for all the fevered note-taking. “What was it like to teach there?” he asked.

“Well from the time it opened the conditions weren’t good. Maybe it would have been fine in the South of England but for the Scottish coast the architecture’s rather laughable. The Potions wing caved in around year two. Initially there were houses like at Hogwarts… altogether ridiculous as there are about one hundred fifty students at any given time, between seven class years — and anyway after a while there were concerns about housing different factions together. So now there are just several separate dormitories. Most of them disappointingly gendered and most of them repurposed from old classrooms.” 

“Isn’t there any facilities funding?” 

“To be honest we mostly need all the money we can get to feed them,” Indra said, “as blood isn’t cheap. Raw meat and fish isn’t cheap. For a while we were trying to solicit tuition where we could but none of these families could afford it. All the funding we get is to feed them and to get them to pass exams, so we can get more funding, so we can feed them. You understand, it’s a cycle — it’s a catch-22.” She indicated Remus’s ignored book, resting beside his teacup of whiskey on the table. “There also, of course — and here's the crux of it, Remus — there remains the issue that even if the Ministry has opened up this quasi-opportunity for part-humans they haven’t really opened up any others. So when they graduate or they want summer internships there are no options. Or more accurately there is precisely one option.” 

In the early autumn of 1978, just before Dumbledore had recruited him for the doomed mission to Brittany, Sirius had found amongst Remus’s stacks of old _Prophet_ s (he saved them for the crossword) a pamphlet for a potions testing facility soliciting werewolves to sample and report on assorted over-the-counter medicinal remedies currently in development to treat hiccups, headaches, sprained ankles, carpal-tunnel pains, et cetera. In a fit of pique a few days previous livid with humiliation that he could neither contribute to his and Sirius’s rent nor their groceries because he had precisely twelve galleons, seven sickles, and a knut to his name after reselling his Hogwarts textbooks (and, in a separate account in a Muggle bank, twenty-four pounds pretty much only so he could ride the Tube), Remus had filled out his name and the address of the Chalk Farm flat in the box that said _YES! I’m interested! Please send me one (1) round of six (6) potions trials by owl order — and my first installment of 100 galleons_! Sirius had promptly burned the pamphlet upon discovery and when Remus had returned home from another dismal round of job searching around the Muggle shops they had fought on the subject, their first knock-down drag-out fight. It seemed to Remus the beginnings of proof there was some unbreachable gulf between them that could never be sealed.

He turned to Sirius, who was watching him, himself remembering, and their eyes met — he remembered this feeling, but he wasn’t certain what to call it, and it hurt, more than a little, and it felt like a siren in the middle of the night in the back of his mind cutting silence, and he had to look away. “Ah,” he said to Indra.

“Indeed.” 

She knew there was something else. She was waiting. At first he was uncertain what for. Outside it thundered. The rain lashed the window and the surf lashed the coast. Sirius looked between them with a strange jealousy; perhaps he thought they could communicate inside their minds. Finally Indra said it: “How did you know?” 

He remembered Dumbledore had told him Sirius had read the trial transcript, and so it was likely that he understood the quasi-reality. The biggest secret Remus had ever tried to keep. Bigger than the furry little problem, which of course had never been much of a secret, and which by now was certainly common knowledge in all of wizarding Britain. “I had dreams,” he tried, knowing Indra would grasp it; she had had dreams too. “In his — his dreams.” 

Sirius took a sharp breath through his nose. _I'm sorry_ , Remus thought desperately, _I'm sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it isn't how you think, but I can’t tell you how it is…_

Indra leant across the table; her eyes were bright and cold, and she had cocked an eyebrow, and her mouth was grim. He wondered if she knew — how she knew. “Lucius Malfoy,” Remus went on, “the Death Eater, gave him — these horrible photographs. That was last year — the spring into the summer.” 

“Yes. The main potions testing facility recruiting at Coll School had started trials with what they said were some more dangerous substances. Which turned out of course to be all the assimilationist material: Wolfsbane, and the false blood, and the anti-suggestion potions for kelpies and Veela. Because it was more dangerous the students could take a ferry boat directly from school to the facility after classes and the stipend was quite good. You must understand many of these kids — they have no families to go home to and get on their feet. When they graduate they’re on their own. So many of them seek out their masters.” 

Remus bit the inside of his lip so hard he could taste blood, hot iron, warm as life. Sirius had covered his mouth with his hand. 

“Many of the others — I think most of it is bullshit but the Ministry put up a big stink two years or so ago before your breakout became the big murderous werewolf news du jour. They say there are these sort of part-human bands… all sorts of _breeds_ , they literally wrote in the _Prophet_ , horrible stuff, plotting against wizards, C4 in the basement, Muggle assault weapons, all that jazz. Anyway a group of six kids, Coll School graduates, were arrested by MLE in Manchester apparently planning to target Ministry property.” 

“Did they — Azkaban?” 

“I think so.” 

To think the dominos of this complete extended horror had begun falling when Peter had given Bellatrix his and Sirius's names. In the summer, 1978, and meanwhile they were laughing and kissing and fucking on the floor in the sun that would stretch in through the windows… it was as though nothing was happening beyond that room, beyond their skin, but everything was, and when it caught up, it was like a cold sea, like a flood — like the tide washing ever in, and picking up what was left behind. 

Of course it was his fault. Could all this have been constructed if had not been him who had been consigned to go under? The sacrificial lamb waiting on the dais to bleed to death before the greater good. There must have been some moment — someone must have heard his defense and thought very quickly about what could be orchestrated if it were discounted. Dementors were not the only quasi-living creatures who could manipulate fear. If he had trusted Sirius it would not have been. If he hadn’t let Greyback twist his mind — clench it in a meaty fist and squeeze until it burst — 

Under the table the toe of Sirius’s shoe pressed his bare foot very tightly such that it could not have been an accident. He realized the ringing in his ears was the clenching of his jaw and he realized that Indra was still talking. 

“When kids started not coming back from the facility — at first we went to the relevant authorities. They wouldn’t pursue any of it, because they were assumed to have gone with their masters. Or later, saying they went missing was tantamount to basically putting them on a big Wanted list… saying they were part of these radical cells. And plus plenty came back… sometimes they were so sick they couldn’t go to class. But they came back. Then there were, about a year ago, the pamphlets, with the pictures, claiming casualties, claiming other sorts of testing — weapons testing, spell testing — and claiming Ministry involvement. And with those, and your breakout — this time when they didn’t come back we knew they had radicalized. But you’re saying Greyback had those images and he got them from the Malfoys?”

He could not even think anymore for all it was so tangled and spinning. “Yes,” he told Indra, but his voice was only half-there. He rested his forehead in his palm with his elbow propped against the table and closed his eyes. Sirius’s foot pressed still against his and he could feel Sirius watching him and he thought he might vomit, or weep. He wished he could crawl into the earth and lie down. Something warm and quiet and heavy. Something that would hold him still while the rest of him came back enough to make sense of it all. Finally he said aloud what he had been wondering for thirteen years: “Why are they doing this?” 

He heard Sirius’s little huff. The sound he made when he thought he knew the answer but he wasn’t sure enough to say it. 

“They hate us,” Indra said. “I don’t know why else. I’ve wondered…” She reached across the table and squeezed Remus’s hand. “It isn’t your fault,” she went on, and she sounded like a teacher, but she also sounded on the verge of tears. “They’ve made all of it out to be but you must believe me that it isn’t… the way they’ve used you — the image of you, not even the real you, Remus. There’s a piece of you left that they haven’t touched.” 

There isn’t, he thought; no there isn’t. They flayed me open, they looked inside… They had found the purest truth to him, to his very soul, and it was this, this wrong thing. The wrongness he walked with; the wrongness he renewed now and then like a library book. _You will never kill your master — you will never kill the rat…_

_“_ Lucius Malfoy is at the Ministry,” Sirius said, breaking the silence. “His son didn’t stop expostulating on the subject for a minute in the last school year. I had a — he’s a very distant cousin. I spent altogether too much time at Malfoy Manor during the war having fucking tea and crumpets and casual interrogation with Lucius and Narcissa. He would never collude with Greyback if it wasn’t about the Dark Lord.” 

“That means the Death Eaters have already secured two footholds. One in the Ministry and one with the entire distrusting and radicalized part-human population of Britain.” 

Silence again but for the rain and the surf and the thunder moving south across the islands toward the mainland. “We knew it was coming,” said Sirius finally. “He would’ve taken precautions against death.” 

“It’s no different than last time,” Remus said. “He wants dogs he can sic and cull when it’s over.” 

“Unfortunately many part-humans don’t realize that blood purist ideology applies to them too. Especially those who would have pure blood otherwise. Of which there are not few given the vampiric and Veela dynasties… not to mention Greyback’s classic cash-grubbing maneuver of biting gentry which seems to have been borrowed by other werewolf masters. All that matters is the Dark Lord did not get far enough to cull us last time. And it looks incontrovertibly like the Ministry is culling us now.” 

“What can be done?” asked Sirius, who had asked this at every juncture even when it was at its worst, 1980, 1981, in Dumbledore’s office, in James and Lily’s parlor room (whispering because Harry was asleep upstairs), in their bedroom at the flat past midnight with his head on Remus’s chest, and music came in through the windows from the street, and laughter and shouting, and summer, and the smell of the city… 

“We tried,” Remus reminded him. “Last time we tried.” 

And it didn’t work, and it started everything. 

“We will not side with the Ministry,” Indra said. “I won’t, and I don’t think any of us at Coll School would. But perhaps more of us can be persuaded to fight the Dark Lord on our own terms if we can understand he’s not much better.” 

“Where do we start?” 

Indra looked at Sirius for a long moment, and then at Remus, and she picked up the quill from the table and wrote neatly in a blank corner: _Amelia Nguyen — Interview with the Vampire. Mondays 10-midnight, 88.6fm._

“I didn’t know there were even-numbered FM stations,” said Sirius. 

“You have to tune with magic,” Remus remembered, from jobless and healing days spent in the Chalk Farm flat, staring at the ceiling, waiting for Sirius to come home, possessed by fear, possessed by loathing, feeling himself rotting away — longing for and dreading the key in the door, the footsteps in the hallway, Sirius who would drape himself over the couch for a kiss, the dinner they would make and eat together that he could not taste. “But it’s there. Mostly conspiracy bullshit.” 

“This is certainly conspiracy but not bullshit,” said Indra. “I suggest you listen. She has weekly guests of all stripes. Vampires who want to seize Transylvania, werewolves who want to seize Ghawdex, Veela who want to seize Volhynia…” She stood to dig Sirius’s bottle of Old Ogdens out of the icebox and refill her teacup; her chair grated across the floor. Outside it seemed to have almost stopped raining and in the vivid darkness through the window the crescent moon slipped for just a moment through the cloud cover. 

They spoke for a little while longer before Indra told them she had to be back at school for second-shift hall monitoring duty. She squeezed Remus’s hand again, and Sirius walked her to the door, because Remus wasn’t sure he could get up, under the weight of everything, and the weight of the inevitable silence between the two of them that he was not certain he could bear after this, and perhaps he would go outside and sleep on the beach instead of in the bed (with Sirius who would wake him up if he had nightmares and then turn over again facing the opposite wall), and listen to the surf and the rain and the thunder, and stare at the moon, and wait, and wait, which was all he was ever doing, which was all he had ever done, which was all he knew how to do, anymore, because he had done it for twelve years… 

Sirius rinsed their teacups and stacked them in the cupboard and he put the bottle of whiskey back in the icebox and locked the door and put the light out, and then he came to Remus’s side at the table and helped him up, and embraced him. 

The clouds shifted and the moonlight spread out upon the floor. Through the draught beneath the door the night breeze smelled like rain and sea. The resonance in the earth wound around his feet like ivy. He did not know when he had started crying but he was. Silent except he could feel his shoulders jumping. Sirius held him very tightly; he had always held very tightly. Perhaps even in the black years he had been holding so tightly and simply Remus hadn’t felt it because of the suffocating constriction of darkness. 

Sirius smelled like sweat and lavender. The brackish water in the shower out back… like earth, and whiskey. His heartbeat Remus could feel, and his breath, and that he was trying not to cry, because his jaw was clenched tightly. He shifted a little from one foot to the other as if they were dancing and he remembered — the flat, ’78, before everything, God, sixteen years, listening to Iggy Pop, tripping fuck, and he felt — and it stretched out between them and it was everything. And then he had lost it. It had been wrestled away from him with such ease — like so much — because he did not believe it was truly real. 

It did not feel very much like forgiveness, or like anything had really been solved, but no one had so much as touched him with kindness in thirteen years, and the shock of it, of warmth, of belonging, of safety and of calm, was a comfort he had spent very many years convincing himself he did not deserve. Now he understood he would have to hold onto this as long as he could — for his undear life. Like driftwood, like water. Like the seabirds… like the Muggle boats he had seen long ago from the prison in the very bad days, and he remembered the world was real, and he remembered walking on the beach at Brighton and at Margate, in the very end, and he had dared for a moment to hold Sirius’s hand, and he had thought even at that hour so late and so dire, there must be some way we can all be wrong. 

“Moony,” Sirius said. God if it wasn’t like a knife whenever he said that. Far away to the South across Mainland thunder clapped and spread and rumbled across the world. He thought Sirius might say something else but he didn’t. They stood together in the dark for a long time breathing. 


	3. Chapter 3

Remus woke before he did and set about making breakfast — toast and eggs and goat cheese, and a few crisp green apples he cut the brown spots from and sliced in neat wedges — and Sirius watched him from the disillusioned bedroom, half asleep, squinting in the pale sun that came delicately through the window. He remembered Remus’s mother had had an abiding affection for breakfast which customarily at the Lupin household consisted of several dishes and sometimes even courses ending with a plate of charcuterie and a palate cleanser of lime sherbet, or at least it had been that way when they had guests, particularly guests of Sirius and James and Peter’s persuasion; _Remus’s friends_ , whom they had felt a mirrored directive to keep close and often indulged with trips to the Muggle arcades in Minehead in the rattling Lupin station wagon — to secret beaches on the Bristol Channel they had discovered in the early days of their marriage. Remus’s father was a cursebreaker who worked freelance for assorted governmental and non-governmental entities and his mother was an accountant who helped elderly folks around Somerset file their taxes. Just before Remus had been bitten they had been trying to have another child; Remus’s father had told Sirius this, whilst drunk, just before the start of their seventh year at Hogwarts. “Then it was rather like having two children,” he slurred. “Except one was a bit of a feral psychopath so we had to keep it in the basement, and all it did was torment the other anyway.” All summer Sirius had spent at James’s (he had fled Grimmauld Place on Easter break in their sixth year, never to return) lying in bed until noon and then taking very long showers and walking in the woods and swimming in the pond in the rain, writing long letters to Remus he burned before sending very short ones, conceptualizing that perhaps something was afoot, and he thought he knew what it was, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. The morning after the conversation with Lyall he woke up very hungover and stuck by the backs of his legs to one of the Lupins’ plastic lawn chairs when Remus, also looking rather the worse for wear, brought him a joint (already lit, ember glowing) and a Bloody Mary (his mother prepared them with vinegar and pickle juice and a heavy hand of vodka), and Sirius realized what it was.

In the kitchen Remus arranged a piece of toast spread with goat cheese and a fried egg and a spray of apples upon each plate (in the ant-infested cabinets equipped “appropriately” for a young researcher there were precisely two, and they were mismatched), and he filled tumblers of water, and the teakettle boiled, and Sirius decided to pretend it had woken him up. He feigned a yawn and a stretch and stumbled out from behind the smudged curtain of Disillusionment and sat in the bad chair whilst Remus assembled a cup of tea with rather more sugar and less cream than Sirius liked though perhaps he was just preparing it to his memory… 

He had slept poorly after Indra’s visit watching at the way the pale moonlight limned Remus’s shoulder and the nail-bitten hand that grasped it and the curve of his spine and his wild hair which desperately needed a cut wanting pathologically just to touch him though he was not sure what good it would do. He had struggled for thirteen years to reconcile the Remus he had known in school and after with the one from the news and the trial transcript and he could not fathom what it must feel like for Remus to reconcile what remained of himself with everything that had happened in the interim — all the reactionary Ministry politics that had been informed by his alleged betrayal. And yet still there was strangeness unanswered. The fist that had wrapped his gut when Remus spoke about Greyback had not yet loosened. 

“You’ve a gift for fried eggs,” he told Remus, to break the silence, which had gone stale. They looked like cartoon drawings with the yolk perfectly viscous and yellow and Sirius broke the thin membrane and watched it bleed over the toast like a spread of lava. 

Remus looked up, and his eyes focused. Something almost a smile played around a corner of his mouth. Sirius realized maybe the trick to getting him to speak was to start conversations. As of yet he had not really dared. “It must be a kind of reflex,” Remus said. 

“Inherited from your mother.” 

“Yes,” Remus said, “she was skilled with breakfast.” 

You know I realized I was in love with you over her Bloody Marys, Sirius did not say, had never said. He had gone with Remus to the funeral at which Remus had been obliged to wear one of Peter’s suits (his mother had bankrolled his purchase of several after their Hogwarts graduation, when Peter had somehow procured a Ministry job from which he was fired after two weeks), which of course was too short in the leg and wrist; Sirius had extended it with magic in the bathroom, but the ankles still showed that Remus’s socks had holes in them. It was Summer ’79; it was hot as hell; Remus was still obliged to go to St. Mungo’s once a month for checkups, and he still startled if Sirius snuck up on him. He hadn’t known really how to compensate for all the horror except by bringing fancy imported chocolate from the shop on Diagon Alley home whenever possible, and with sex; he had never thought there was a part of Remus he wouldn’t lick, but he had surprised himself. 

“In Azkaban we just had porridge,” Remus said. “And twice a week just a block of tofu. And these bright orange vitamin capsules… and the water tasted like, like they collected it in a rainbarrel lined with crude oil.” 

How did you live, he had been trying to ask, how did you live, how did you remember my face and my name… 

“They brought the tofu block every three days. So sometimes, when it was really bad, I was thinking, that was one unit of time, and then it repeated again over and over the same. Like the whole universe was just three days that repeated. I think it was actually, like in retrospect, it was a couple years.” 

He pressed his foot against Remus’s under the table and it felt like too much and also like not enough. “How did you — do you remember how you came out of it?” 

“Yeah, there were all these boats dragging an oil rig by. Like big drab Muggle boats with all this stuff on them. It was like this big surprise to me that there was a world which is funny because I could remember all sorts but kind of raggedly — I can’t really put my finger on it now I guess.” 

“How did you keep track after that?” 

“Doing tattoos and writing on the wall. Sticking my whole face out the window in the driving snow.” He smiled a little in the corner of his mouth. His egg yolk had congealed in yellow skin against his china plate. “I know you know what they do because I saw last year, but they took everything, they ate everything — they ate time, and they ate themselves, and when I had enough memory of being in that place they ate that, too, and then it was sort of revolving and revolving, and I would even forget about — having this other skin until the moon came up and it just unzipped.” 

“The worst part — just to have them near at Hogwarts was sometimes I wouldn’t even realize they were close by and it was just like falling through thin ice or something into this — viscous black sludge…” 

“Right,” Remus said; there was a thread, just a filament of his young self about his eyes, like when they would be stoned in the common room past three in the morning and the dawn through the window was like a taste in the air or a suggestion and they would all four talk each other through obscure Transfiguration theory until they could grasp it — he had missed, overwhelmingly, talking to Remus, he realized, the simple fact of the existence of someone to whom nothing necessitated explanation, and someone who would tell him without hesitation to shove it when he needed reminding, which in his youth had been very often. “I wish I knew the theory,” Remus continued, “like, why they, how they happened; you remember about Azkaban, there was a Dark wizard and he killed Muggle sailors there and when they found the castle it was full of them… so like, do you think they’re all in the Nazi death camps? Or the — the old American slave plantations or like, Gettysburg or Verdun, or — where was the really bad fight in the Plains Purges?” 

“Didn’t you write a ten-foot paper on the Plains Purges?” 

“Yes but, that was sixth year so I was constantly stoned, and had discovered sex recently, and all the interim black hole sucking, so I don’t remember.” 

“Well there’s no way I remember.” 

Remus settled his elbow against the table and his palm against his forehead slipping through his hair and he screwed his eyes shut and pressed his lips together and at last he said “Kansas.” 

“Well of course — ”

“Stull, Kansas,” he said, snapping his fingers, “see, Sirius, I’ve still got it.” 

“I don’t think there are any Dementors in Stull, Kansas but I do remember that some Muggles think it’s a gateway to hell.” 

“I wouldn’t rule much out but if Azkaban wasn’t then I’m sure it isn’t either. Maybe it’s what they think instead because they can’t see Dementors though they can feel them. They have to be in some Muggle prisons don’t you think just wandering?” 

“And mental hospitals and things. Hotels built on Indian burial grounds…” 

Maybe it was cruel or otherwise misguided to evoke _The Shining_ which they had seen in a very lowbrow theater in London in 1980, midnight showing, and they were alone in the dark which put them both very on edge given it was a bad summer for the war, and so to lighten the mood they shared sips from Sirius’s flask of Old Ogden’s, and eventually (during the climactic scene) they were both so bored and drunk that Remus didn’t protest when Sirius reached across the sticky armrest and snuck a hand in his pants. But either Remus didn't care or didn’t remember; he just nodded. “Where else, um, ghostships… Do you think they can — I wondered if they could survive underwater. I don’t know if they breathe.”

“There was a paper — I could find it for you. It must be with my things at Hogwarts if the old man hasn’t burned them. But it was about Dementors and bad resonance. The sort of intrinsic connection and the construction off the base theory, humans inherited magic from resonance thus did Dementors inherit existence from bad resonance…” 

“Azkaban has a bad resonance, I suppose I should’ve told you. So does the facility with the potions testing on the Scottish coast.” 

“You’ve — you went there?” 

Remus looked at him for just a moment quizzically as though he had forgotten they had really not done much speaking at all since the night in the Shack. “Yes well, right after, August I suppose, I was running, they were all — they followed across the tarn, like I could see them sometimes how close they were, and I ran all day and all night, and my feet were bleeding, because I had these — terrible shoes from a Muggle dumpster. There was a stone circle in Aberdeenshire and when I got there I cast a Patronus and it was — you saw it. The gold, the gold wolf.” 

“How did you keep it around?” 

“I honestly don’t know but it took me to the facility and then to — to Hogwarts. When it touched them they — like they seized up and they were gone. Which perhaps it’s relevant to your theory, you know, resonances sort of cancelling each other, though it is rather pretty to assume just that the good would destroy the bad…” 

He was a genius deflector. Sirius had learned this fucking first year at Hogwarts and in the interim years he thought he remembered vividly every single time Remus had done it. He had realized Remus could easily cast a Patronus without a wand if his magic was at a Ghawdex-induced high. Perhaps it felt different for werewolves… perhaps he didn’t even understand he had it. But he could not ask Remus about it now — not when they were talking together like this and it had been years. 

Together they cleaned up and Sirius went to the circle and Remus sat with him for a while pacing and feeling for resonance and exploring the ruins of the church and when the sun peeked out from behind a sheet of stretched-cotton clouds he went to swim. From afar across the grass and the shore Sirius watched the white and pinkish smudge of him in the sun when he undressed and waded in seeming silhouetted against the green spreading fields across the channel on Mainland and the shifting sun seeping through the clouds and the water and he looked like an abstract painting — like a suggestion of a feeling — and Sirius thought he would never forgive himself for yearning after everything that had happened.

The research grant he had received was to source code the resonance of this henge which had never quite been his strong suit so he had solicited some advice from Riley Song in the grad program at St. Andrews’ who sent him long letters explaining the methodology she was using to source code resonant artifacts deep in the mazelike sub-basements of the university museum. _I know you said you don’t drop acid anymore but the best source coding I think I ever did was while tripping. I don’t know, I think I’m going to write a paper about how it tends to be easier on drugs. I can send you some pot if you want it. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if you are growing it yourself by now._ He had explained to her what had happened kind of obliquely; Dumbledore had warned him to keep even the fact of his quitting secret from everyone he could, but it seemed unfair to lie to Riley. He had indeed asked her to send some pot thinking Remus might also enjoy it but that had been a few weeks previous and there was always a lag between her owls. 

Now he consulted the notes he’d made from all the relevant haute-academic literature he could decipher with regard to source coding. Several of the steps he could indeed do with a dearth of magic (it was part of the reason he had come to deeply appreciate he had gone into this particular field) but most of those he had done already, including a full terramancy sketch and spell history going back to the time of the building of the church. It was a tedious process by hand, but possible, and at first he had done it simply to keep from spending all his time sitting in the kitchen sipping at a tumbler of whiskey while Remus slept. He would need magic to go deeper into the spell history, and he could feel how deep the deeper went, the glowing core at the heart of it, which added another exhilirating dimension to the simmering frustration in his very blood. He had thought about asking Remus to help him but it seemed like cheating, and besides he didn’t know if Remus would want to, or if he remembered how. 

Even if he was rather useless at least temporarily Sirius was grateful that Dumbledore had set him up with this research grant instead of any of the others for study of resonant sites in Britain. He could feel in the spell history that no one had source coded this place before (at least no one had in the current commonly understood academic method) which intrigued him because it was very historic and much had been theorized with regard to its construction. If it had had compulsion it didn’t anymore, which was also interesting. It had been initially warded against Muggles around the time of the International Statute of Secrecy but those wards had been tightened by the Oxford magical theory department in the 1880s when the site had come under their academic jurisdiction. Previous researchers had mostly done a bit of Muggle archaeology and carbon dating with some spells that weren’t commonly used in the British academic tradition. 

He tried — as he had been trying now for a month — to go a bit deeper even as he knew he would come upon a wall around the twelfth century. The magic performed on site around that era was chiefly religious in nature, ancient wandwork and even some impressive casting with rings that Medieval wizards had cleverly massaged into Christian dogma. The spells themselves were pre-Latinate in structure and most of them Sirius had to write phonetically before digging through his old books. 

His eyes were shut and he was so focused on pressing through that wall that he did not notice the arrival of Harry’s white owl until she pecked his knee, shattering the trance. When he looked up she studied him with her head cocked curiously. Down the hill toward the beach he saw Remus had come to the shore and was sitting in the shallow water watching the movement of the clouds. 

When he untied the scroll from her foot the owl waited, which meant Harry had asked for a reply. He was a notoriously long-winded correspondent (James had also been) and at first Sirius skimmed until he noticed the phrase: _don’t know if you saw in the Prophet but someone cast the Dark Mark at the Quidditch World Cup —_

Purposefully he had cancelled his subscription to the _Prophet_ when they came to Eynhallow. Yet Harry, of course, had enclosed a neatly excised newsprint clipping. Seeing the Mark again thirteen years on twisted something tightly in Sirius’s gut. Some ugly shivering reflex — the way his mind had seemed to shrink in the war, and how for years after he could not turn his back to darkness. He had not forgotten the feeling of black certainty — his stomach falling out —he had always felt at the sight of it: certainty that inside there would be death. 

He folded the clipping tightly and tucked it in his pocket and then he read on. 

_I know your plate is probably rather full. Dumbledore told me they have Peter Pettigrew in a holding cell at the Ministry but so much is politically delicate they are trying to keep it a secret. I don’t mean to burden you with all this. But you asked for me to keep you updated on what’s happening at Hogwarts. So I should tell you that this year they are going to do a Triwizard Tournament._

He folded the letter up and put it in his pocket with the clipping without reading the rest. Then he packed up his research things and brought it all inside and went down to the beach as Remus was coming up to the cottage. From previous inhabitants they had inherited a threadbare pair of large pale pink beach towels, one of which Remus had wrapped around himself against the cool breeze. There were glassy pieces of sand threaded in his damp dark hair and chips of mica stuck in the salt across his collar and chest and his skin was flushed and goosebumped and wet and for a moment Sirius’s head cleared of everything he had planned to say. “The current was really strong today,” Remus told him. 

He gathered it slowly and by pieces. “I got a — a letter from Harry. Want to put dry clothes on and we can make a drink and have a talk?” 

“It’s hardly noon,” said Remus, but his voice was soft and worried. They walked together up to the cottage and when the cool breeze shifted through stirring the grass Sirius could feel just a suppressed thread of Remus beside him shivering. 

\--

In the Shack in June in the ringing silence afterward — when it seemed like it was over his head was slamming like a door and he did not dare open his eyes to see what he had done. It stood to reason that his instinctive magic would be stronger if the rest of it also was, he thought distantly, but now everything seemed rather shattered. As though he had used all of it, every drop of it allocated to himself when he was born, and now in its place there was a hollow glowing nothing he could almost see swarming in the darkness — 

He could not bear the sight of it anymore, so he opened his eyes. Remus — the handsome russet wolf mangy about the collar and frothing rabidly about the mouth — lay on his flank unconscious yet softly breathing. Just beyond him near one of the chewed-open mouseholes in the moulding was the rat also sleeping in a little grey lump. Sirius stepped around the werewolf and picked it up. In his palm he could feel the tiny heart beating ponderously as though none of the events of the past twenty minutes had happened at all. 

There was a spell for sleep he had learned from Pomfrey in the early days of the war when the entire Order had been consigned to learn a range of healing spells but she had cautioned them all not to attempt to use it for any kind of combat advantage as it simply did not work that way. But it seemed if you had a wild excess of magic and snapped like a twig it could indeed be massaged to work that way. Carrying the rat he went out into the hallway where Harry and Ron and Hermione had collapsed in a pile near the top of the stairs; Ron was snoring, and their faces which in the crack in the door minutes previous had seemed shocked and manic were now soft and composed in sleep. Sirius pulled them apart (they didn’t stir) against their embarrassment when they woke and then he shut the door to the room Remus was in and leaned against it in attempt to collect himself. 

He could not leave three unconscious children in a decaying building with a real live escaped convict werewolf, albeit also unconscious, closed up behind an unlocked door, and he was not sure he had enough time to wait for them to wake up and send one to the castle. Perhaps Dementors had already pinpointed their location — indeed they had been allowed to roam Hogsmeade after the last Patronus scare — and he wasn’t sure he could muster the transformation into the dog, and he was certain he wouldn’t be able to hold the squirming rat in his jaws until the dawn came. 

His wand was in his jeans pocket; he hadn’t once touched it in weeks and it felt almost unfamiliar in his hand, as though it belonged to someone else. The only memory — the only certainty he needed was the most recent one. _Remus is innocent_. 

It hurt so desperately he had to enunciate the spell through clenched teeth and the silver dog struggled out from his wand as though from some ectoplasmic womb and when it was fully formed and he could break the thread at last he dry heaved twice, head spinning, before he could command it to fetch Dumbledore. “Tell him I have a surprise for him,” he said, but his own voice sounded far away. 

Later he realized he must have passed out until he heard the footsteps on the stairs. Even in unconsciousness his grip had not loosened on the rat. He opened his eyes and squinted in the fresh darkness at Dumbledore’s bluish wandlight on the lower landing thrown like fluorescent paint against the torn collapsing portraits and the peeling wallpaper. To think how much time he had spent in this house feeling blisteredly in love with any number of things… and how first it had been their youth… 

“Come on up, Albus,” he said, voice cracking; “I haven’t got the magic to duel you.” 

Dumbledore came up the last flight and stepped around the unconscious children and when he came close Sirius saw he looked perhaps for the first time in his memory like he had walked into something for which he was not prepared. “What happened here?” 

“ _Quiesco_ ,” said Sirius. “Not on purpose.” He realized he sounded a little manic with adrenaline and shock but he went on. “I’ve been sitting here and I just can’t imagine, I can’t fathom how you wouldn’t’ve known.” 

“How I wouldn’t’ve known what.” 

“It’s not a rat,” Sirius said, lifting the limp creature by its neck. “Well it is, I suppose, metaphorically or whatnot.” 

Dumbledore looked at the animal for a moment and then past Sirius toward the locked door. “You have spellshock, Sirius, it’s not uncommon in cases like yours…” 

“Humor me,” he said, “Albus, humor me, try _hominem revelio._ Just to see.” 

“First,” Dumbledore countered, pointing his wand toward the doorknob just above Sirius’s head, “shall we — ”

“Honestly you will be setting foot in that room over my dead body.” 

At last Dumbledore uttered the syllable reserved for moments where he had come to full and nuanced understanding of the scenario, a syllable Sirius found he dreaded above all else, because it connoted some finality, and it connoted, always, a dreadful sort of plan already underway: “Ah.” 

“Do the spell,” he tried again, “you know I would do it if I could.” 

Warily Dumbledore raised his wand, and Sirius put the sleeping rat beside him against the door, caging it in with his hands just in case; he was wary to let go of his throttle on its neck. This was so fragile and could evaporate so quickly he found himself anticipating something gone wrong, or the end of the dream. “ _Hominem revelio_ ,” said Dumbledore. 

Sirius closed his eyes against the flash of light, and then he smelled it, unwashedness and fear, and the strange misshapen underworn human shape of Peter Pettigrew came to being once more beside him for the second time in thirteen years. 

Dumbledore was looking at the sleeping body with a tight-lipped expression Sirius couldn’t quite read. “He as good as told us,” Sirius went on, “just before moonrise, he gave our names to Bellatrix, Summer ’78.” 

There was a longer pause this time in which Sirius felt the slender ticklish thread of Leglimency inside his mind — fact-checking — before Dumbledore said, again, “Ah.” 

“You all suspected — ” it twisted in his stomach and a separate cord tugged far in the back of his mind, ringing truth, pure and naked as a bell pealing in the fog — “you all suspected it was me.” 

Dumbledore could not quite meet his eyes when he said, “Yes.” And Sirius recalled, all in a flood, the months compounding years after that bloody December — when he could feel Remus beside him in bed with his breath and his heart too quick to be sleeping (the wedge of moon was high in the window), and how Remus would always skim his fingers inside Sirius’s forearm, and how sometimes his things were in disarray and Remus had said he had been cleaning, and the secretive owls, and the sitting on the couch with a joint listening to “Gimme Shelter” and staring into space… _You set up that thing that had a hold on me…_

“Right,” Sirius said, standing; Peter stunk suffocatingly, like years of hiding, like very old sweat, and he knew if he thought deep enough into all the history it would take him years to come out. He had to grasp the door’s lintel because his head spun blackly with exhaustion and he felt something in his stomach curl. Stale nausea. “I want a portkey to the castle for him and me ten minutes after dawn.” 

“And then,” said Dumbledore, attempting to gather his control over the situation at last, “what do you propose we do.” 

“Turn the fucking rat in to the Ministry and take it from there. I’m quitting, by the way, right now, this is my notice. We had a good run didn't we? Holy bloody Christ.” He could hear his own voice getting progressively louder. “Twelve years? How many fucking times did I tell you I didn’t — ” 

“Rest assured I — this is quite the surprise to me as well.” 

He did not believe it. None of this had ever been quite believable and yet he had fallen for it. Dominoes had been aligned. All he could do from here was refuse to make the mistake of implicitly trusting Dumbledore again. 

“You saw him in there and you — you said there was nothing left of him anymore.” 

“You must understand,” Dumbledore started, but he looked away before he could finish. “Sometimes a lie is friendlier than the truth.” 

He felt scraped raw. He covered his mouth with his hand to keep from saying anything he would truly regret, or perhaps simply to keep from vomiting. 

“I will take Mr. Pettigrew and the children up to the castle,” Dumbledore said, then he took a chipped vase off the hall bookshelf and tapped it with his wand. “Ten minutes after dawn this will take you to my office.” 

“And then what.” 

“I am relatively confident I will think of something in the interim — ” he checked his moonwatch — “six hours.” With a wave of his wand he floated all the sleeping bodies before him and started off again down the stairs toward the tunnel. “Don’t let your guard down,” he called from the landing. “Werewolf metabolism is frankly miraculous and given your Frankenstein melange of accidental spellwork I’m not certain how long it’ll last.” 

Sirius nearly flipped him a V for that but he could hardly summon the energy to keep standing up. He heard the trapdoor to the passageway opening and closing below and he leaned against the door pressing his ear to it as though inside he could hear the wolf dreaming, but instead he fell asleep. 

He woke with a start just before dawn when the complete rabid weight of something threw itself against the door. Snarling scrabbling clawing at the threshold and the pale light. Sirius pushed himself away across the floor against the far wall. 

It took him a moment to reorder again what was happening. He could feel the thread of the dog still passing through his mind and his skin and he thought likely he could put it on if he had to. But in the high window at the top of the stairs the sky was lightening. He had not forgotten this from the full moon nights they had spent together in the Forest and from his own lonely nights in the early ‘80s finishing Alphard’s book chain-smoking and by the near-dawn hour he would be drunk, because he would’ve been drinking all night, and as such he would think of Remus, and as such when he slept through the day in the back bedroom with all the shades tightly drawn his dreams felt shivery and false-lucid and they were full of skin, and blood, and they snatched away when he woke as though they had never been at all. 

“Moony,” he tried; his voice broke a little. “It’s alright,” he said, a little louder, “almost there.” 

It threw itself once more against the door and then it stopped and he heard it scrabble at the threshold whining. God it had been alone so long so very very alone so long such fathomless bottomless aloneness he could not even comprehend… 

“I wish I could,” he said, “I wish.” 

I wish I had refused to believe it all. I wish I had searched over hill and vale through all the history and all the filaments in every Pensieve and through every one of my own memories until I found a truth that satisfied me… I wish I had believed, in the trial transcript, “But — ” 

Of course now it was altogether too late. Altogether too late for everything, and he remembered Bowie’s “Station to Station,” too late to be grateful, too late to be late again — “Moony,” he said again, feeling stupid; he’d never before attempted this, and for all his wishful thinking in the seventies it seemed it couldn’t work. “I’m right, I’m right here.” 

This time his voice broke a little because he was crying. He pressed his forehead against the door and spoke to it and listened until the dawn in the window above the stairs spread like milk over the floor, at which point he shoved the door open and watched the last of its throes and its howls and shakes and twitchings until it ceased to be and instead of it Remus was. Naked and very small like a smudge — a suggestion of a person. Bones and scars and black ink marks; skin like a map to somewhere lost, stretched over carven rigging. Mined out for riches and left hollow and collapsing. 

This was how it was going to be from now on no matter what had happened or had not and no matter what of it was true and what of it had been a lie and what of it he had believed, he had swallowed hook line and sinker and he had lived for thirteen years; this was how it was going to be from now on. 

He fetched one of the blankets from the bed and shook it out of years worth of dust and mold and rat droppings and by the time it was clean enough he could stand to touch it Remus’s eyes were open and watching him. 

\--

At the kitchen table Remus traced the Dark Mark shifting and sparkling on the newsprint clipping with a contemplative finger, sand and blood wedged blackly under the short ragged nail. “Did he say anything about how it happened.” 

“Something about a house elf but — ” 

He realized it as Remus’s head snapped up. The look in his eyes for the past two months had either been exhausted or feral; now it was a little of both, and something else, uncanny familiar, excavated and dusty from a very old time. “Another,” he said. 

The squirmy feeling of guilt remembering Kreacher and the since-mounted house elves of his childhood Sirius tried to suppress with little result. “Yes,” he agreed, “another.” Everything they had built — everything they were building — like a ragged wall of conjecture. Some final desperate fortification against a not-quite-unknown. “It has to be — some perceived defense against the Dark Lord.” 

“How can they possibly — it must take some severe collective delusion.” 

“Who do you think is _they_?” Sirius asked, trying to tread delicately. 

“I don’t know. Do you?” 

He didn’t want to say, _Dumbledore_ , but Sirius could see it behind his eyes. 

“There was this Ministry suit on the Hogwarts board who pushed through the measure for Coll School. Mr. Smith.” 

Remus nodded. “They talked about how they need to owl him. After it worked.” 

He had not talked much about the potion trials. Whenever he spoke about any of the truth of it or about the cold years Sirius felt he couldn’t so much as breathe lest it break. He supposed he had tried his best to value whatever Remus had to say in school (though he hadn’t really managed to do it right until after the Event, fifth year) and in the years they lived together after but he had never before considered it so fragile — so sacred. As though somewhere in it the truth of everything was coded. 

“I thought it couldn’t be a real wizard’s name.” 

“I doubt it is,” he said, “Remus, what — ” 

He was not entirely sure what he meant to ask and anyway he quickly noticed Remus was looking past him toward the rack beside the door on which Sirius had hung his rainslicker and Remus had hung the wet beach towel. On the shelf above the hooks were a few knickknacks he had not paid much attention to since their move-in — fancy teacups mounted on dusty stands and something that looked like a Geiger counter and, shoved in the back of it all, an old-fashioned radio. The speaker was torn and the dials tarnishing and the rime of dust on it was so thick and dark as to seem like ash. 

Remus took from the pile of papers on the table the completely illegible notes he had taken the night previous at the top of which Yates had written in her professorial hand the time and date of Amelia Nguyen’s radio show, _Interview with the Vampire_. Then he looked up at Sirius not quite expectantly, the way he had looked up when they had been in school, and James had laid out some utterly ridiculous prank concept whose development and execution they all knew was inevitable. 

Much was yet unhealed or negotiated between them or generally and besides they had been instructed in no uncertain terms to keep to themselves. Certainly this was a step toward something larger and yet neither of them since their respective boyhoods had been capable of staying out of trouble more than thirty seconds when they knew it existed and he supposed in that regard they had always brought out the worst or best in each other depending on who was asking. In the quietude Sirius could hear Remus bouncing his knee rabidly under the table. The waves upon the beach. The wind under the door. He went to the shelf and took the radio down. 


	4. Chapter 4

He hadn't dreamed at all that he could remember when he was on the run but in the course of the two months they had spent in the cabin on Eynhallow Remus’s dreams had gone from very very bad to mostly neutral and occasionally harrowing. The worst of the nightmares were of course the ones that felt like waking up in Azkaban which luckily had faded in frequency since their arrival. Of late the bad dreams had been the bad dreams that had always been the bad dreams, in which he was walking through a dark concrete maze reminiscent vaguely of the World War II bunkers on the South coast of Cornwall and he understood — it tugged some thread in him, a smell, a shaking chord of sound — that Greyback pursued him. He had had these dreams at his family home in Castle Cary and later at Hogwarts and in the flat in Chalk Farm and he had had them in Azkaban — in those he could feel Greyback breathing on his neck, his rotten blood stench, his burning hands — and he had become expert at waking up from them and reminding himself where he truly was. Yet of course he had not become expert at realizing in the dream that it was not real. 

When he woke up this time he lay on his back in the bed and stared at the ceiling. Both of them had offered to sleep on the kitchen floor; Remus had said he was used to floors, and to the cold ground, Sirius had protested exactly for that reason. It felt like a glaring setup the same way everything did; Remus was certain somewhere in Dumbledore’s grand plan was a caveat that one of them would end up severely emotionally wounded (at least) by the other’s hand. _Wait_ , reminded a little piece of his brain, _wait and see_. He thought perhaps it was his conscience or rationality rebirthed like a phoenix weak and pale and naked as a newborn fawn. It was hard to lend it any sort of credence regarding survival and anyway he had done his waiting; he had done twelve years of it. 

Sirius snored, just a little, kind of prettily; he never used to sleep in a shirt, but of course he did now. He looked handsome and entirely not almost thirty-five and his brow was a little furrowed and there were ink stains between his fingers. After a little while Remus had to look away and out the window, where the moon was swelling to the South over Mainland, vivid white light; the stars were out, and the grass moved gently. Sirius had propped the window open with one of his books and the breeze was soft and smelled of sea and it made a sound like a chorus of whispers. 

Softness was another thing he had forgotten; in Azkaban everything had been blunt at the edge, he thought, and sharp and solid and unyielding, and he had thrown himself against it to the point of shattering. 

Perhaps it would help him sleep to get a drink and take a walk. There was no clock in the bedroom so in the summer they had both woken around five in the morning in the wash of early light not even realizing. But by the stars it was far from dawn. He thought about going to the water and feeling the current, the tugging tidal weight in the sound and its lunar twin above, and he wondered if somewhere in the cottage there were cigarettes; there had to be, Sirius said he had quit in the eighties, but sometimes he smelled like stale smoke. 

Remus tiptoed to the kitchen and poured a bit of Old Ogden’s into one of the chipped teacups and filtered through a few of the papers on the kitchen table including the page of his notes looking like indecipherable ancient runes but for Indra’s neat professorial handwriting across the top. Then from the bedroom Sirius said his name, sharp and quick, not quite panicked, but not far from it. 

“Here,” he said, poking his head in passed the Disillusioned veil, “getting a drink, do you want some?” 

Sirius turned over on his side; he was still asleep. 

Remus took a careful step in and put the teacup on the dresser and crept to the bedside remembering Sirius’s dreams in the Chalk Farm flat; some nights he would be out past midnight, and he would come home and sometimes he would cry and sometimes they would get shitfaced drunk together at the kitchen table and sometimes they would just fuck, and then Sirius would sleep till noon, fitfully, and Remus would bring him tea, and wake him up when he had bad dreams. He said he dreamed over and over that he came home and saw the Mark above the flat spreading sickly green on the wet night street like the beam of a lighthouse against the sea. Even as Remus lay with him and traced the veins inside his arm. _Just to check_. 

Sirius made a tiny sound like a kicked dog and Remus grasped his shoulder and shook. Just at the touch something shocked through him like a bolt of static, like a record (his heartbeat) skipping, like having shoved his finger powerfully in an electrical socket. Then it spread throughout, and his fingertips were tingling, and he felt wide awake, scorched, bright from the inside… “Wake up,” he said, shaken, then louder, “Sirius!” 

The grey eyes fluttered and opened and for a moment were lost, and Remus let go of his shoulder. It was magic, he realized, altogether too late; a shock of magic, he could feel it now, flaming hot and quick like newspaper, he was suddenly certain he could cast any spell he wanted, and he felt lightheaded, and for a moment he wasn’t certain if his feet were touching the ground. It had been years since he had had this much and it wasn’t his own and it knew it as much as he himself did. Then as quickly as it had come it was gone again, but his heart was still racing. 

“Hi there,” said Sirius, hoarse, half-asleep, “alright?” 

Something told him not to ask exactly what that had been. Perhaps it was some side-effect of all the source coding. It was always magical theory academics profiled in _Quibbler_ exposes about magic Gone Too Far, Remus recalled; in fourth year after discovering pot he had delighted in reading back issues. Or perhaps it had nothing to with Sirius at all and it was just Eynhallow and the henge itself, and thus perhaps it was all part of Dumbledore’s grand setup. “You were dreaming,” Remus told him. 

He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed and Remus took a step back. “Huh,” he said. “I don’t remember.” 

He was certain that was a lie but then he had been certain about very many supposed lies thirteen years previous. “I was getting a bit of whiskey,” Remus tried again, “do you want some?” 

When Sirius agreed Remus took his teacup from the dresser and brought it in the kitchen and he tried to summon the thread of the shock of magic and open the icebox from across the room but of course it didn't work. When he brought two refilled teacups back in the bedroom Sirius had laid down again and fallen back asleep. So he drank both himself, altogether too quickly, and he walked in the moonlight down to the sea. He supposed proximity to both had always tended to make him restless on account of somewhat shared histories. By the time he walked back up to the cottage he had convinced himself he had imagined it. 

Until the morning: 

“Want to try and see if you can fix the radio,” said Sirius jovially, at the sink; he was doing their breakfast dishes with magic, and he had made coffee with magic, and he had made perfectly fried eggs with magic while Remus slept, which would not have been so strange except that Remus had not seen him do magic at all since the night in the Shack. 

“I don’t know how much,” he said, carefully, “you know, it’s so small and exact, how much I can do without a wand.” 

Sirius passed his out of his pocket and over the table. In the sink the dishes bubbled away. They waltzed together dripping like a scene out of _Fantasia_. “You can borrow mine.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah,” said Sirius, and he smiled, “sure, I don’t need it today.” 

Of course this this this was so familiar above all like more familiar than his own face in the mirror: more familiar even than the moon. Watching at this person who was hardly separate, like a piece of himself he had lost, like the face he would know (had known) in death, watching at him, and thinking _what is this thing that you are not telling me?_ But then it was almost certain Sirius was thinking the same of him. 

\--

Four days before the full moon Sirius was out at the henge trying to read Iron Age spell history and Remus had managed to fix the radio enough to pick up the local Muggle channels. He had found one he liked he kept on while he tried to pick up the wizarding ones; it was playing Bowie's "Station to Station" (which he recalled had been on repeat on Peter’s turntable the first time he ever dropped acid, which had also been Peter's first time, and James and Sirius's second, as they had done that summer what they called a "trial run" in the woods near James's family home, and Sirius had reported he had felt like he was trapped in a hand-drawn Disney cartoon from the 1930s; it was September 1976, and Remus had heard the song before, as that summer his father, an avowed Bowie fan, had purchased the vinyl, but now it seemed like it was going to go on forever, and he was content with that, such as it was… James was leaning up against his bed with his eyes shut playing what he probably thought looked like air guitar, and tapping his feet just out of tune, and Sirius, who was almost seventeen and who over the summer had grown perhaps three chest hairs and had summarily stopped buttoning his shirt all the way, was waltzing about the room miming all the lyrics with these karate-like moves and balletic steps, and Remus stretched his legs, and he could feel every ligament, "it's too late to be grateful… it's too late to be late again… it’s too late to be hateful… the European canon is here…") and he had managed to remember enough of the lyrics to sing along to the end piece under his breath when Dumbledore walked out of the fireplace. 

At first he thought perhaps it was a dream or a hallucination as he had thought upon that first visitation in Azkaban. But as Remus warily stood Dumbledore sat heavily in one of the kitchen chairs, and it creaked, and Bowie kept singing, "it's too late…" The old man carried with him a canvas bag containing something that clinked. "Ah," he said, "the Thin White Duke." 

He willed his voice to keep from shaking. ”What are you doing here?" 

"Two things. One — ” he indicated the canvas bag he’d placed on the table — “here is the final iteration of the Wolfsbane potion which will shortly be available for only a nominal fee to all werewolves in Britain thanks to your participation and perhaps overseas as well if we can secure trade partners. Though I will tell you the Americans are putting up a stink — ”

"I don't want it." 

"Remus, whyever not? I thought you might have gotten accustomed to being lucid during your monthly misfortune." 

How to tell Dumbledore he had come to almost crave the snatching and filing away of his mind in his transformations? Better to have nothing at all than the shuffled mess and the blinding, suffocating weight of knowledge. Additionally he had perhaps unfairly chalked up his utter lack of appetite and occasional debilitating nausea to the potion's wreaking havoc on his insides. So much as thinking about the taste of it again made his stomach revolt violently. "I've been fine without it these past months," Remus said. 

Dumbledore paused and studied him. _Occlumens_ , Remus thought desperately, not optimistic it would work. “Does Sirius put you outside and lock the door?” 

Like a dog. His stomach twisted at the thought of it and he was certain suddenly that Dumbledore had indeed put them here together as a means of renewed torture. Yet he could not tell Dumbledore the truth, because no one knew about Sirius’s Animagus. He bit the inside of his lip, and then he said, hating it, “Yes.” 

"If the tide's low enough a wolf could easily swim the channel. As I suppose you know,” Dumbledore said, smiling in a wry corner of his mouth, “having swum a much longer and deeper channel before." 

Here was the latest of the ceaseless setups: to admit to his weakness, to the months of stasis and the exhaustion, to tell a secret that was not his own, or to admit he was dangerous. "What's the second thing," he said instead. 

Dumbledore caught his deflection; the wry smile twisted. “I thought you might want to know I received word from a source at the Ministry last week with regard to a werewolf attack on the last full moon, in Cornwall, with three children bitten.” 

“While I’m honored to be the recipient of any and all horrible werewolf news — ” 

“It is almost certainly Greyback,” Dumbledore said. “The signature is — ” 

He touched his neck just at the joint of collar and shoulder where Remus knew his own scar was visible, and then he touched his opposite side, high on the belly almost at the ribs, where the other scar was. 

“Certainly he has heard of your breakout,” Dumbledore continued through the high-pitched wailing klaxon ringing in Remus’s ears. “I am sure you two have warded this island considerably against potential interlopers?” 

“Unless they walk out of the fireplace,” Remus lied. “We didn’t know it was on-network.” 

Dumbledore’s expression suggested it in fact wasn’t. “I am sure that between you both you can summon the memory and the magic necessary to cast the same wards we used in the first war.” 

“The first.” 

“Yes, it seems rather clear these are the seeds of the second, does it not?” 

He looked so tired, tireder than Remus had ever seen him, tireder than he had looked at the trials in Azkaban. Tired, he reminded himself, from potions testing, from back-room conniving, from magicking himself out of off-network Floos — tired from orchestrating and conducting a complete fifteen-year symphony of systematic degradation excusable or necessary somewhere in his seemingly infinite mind. 

“I had a couple dreams of his last time when he crossed the channel,” said Remus, cold and still; he too sounded tired, he realized, tired of all this, worn down to the bone of all this. “Around March of ’81. I’ll owl you if it happens again.” 

“I don’t recall that from March of ’81,” said Dumbledore, eyes twinkling. 

He had not told anybody when it had happened (thrice) and he had spent each of the mornings after waking puking his guts out and he did not tell Sirius who had woken up when he stumbled from bed and held his hair from his forehead and combed his fingers with a gentle hypnotic motion behind Remus’s ears and they did not speak. Sirius was working hours so suspiciously long in those days Remus could tell him he suspected he had gotten bad takeout or something which he seemed to believe every time such that on the third time it happened he said, “You really ought to stop going to that curry place, Moony…” 

“I don’t like talking about this,” he told Dumbledore, which was a mistake as much as anything else he could have said would be. 

“I would’ve thought you might’ve — ”

“The moral of the story is if you hadn’t foregone extradition so he could testify Veritaserum-enhanced bullshit against me it’s likely he would still be in Azkaban.” 

Dumbledore paused for a breath and in the silence Remus heard the Muggle radio playing a song he didn’t recognize, because he had missed the whole eighties, and Sirius had only managed to bring with him a handful of records in their dewey June dawn flight to Orkney… He recalled in the seventies music had been like a tool for living in the world, like he could put a record on and it would clear a path — “It’s not the side effects of the cocaine, I’m thinking that it must be love…” This world had no tools for living in; he had lost them all, or they had been taken away, except the one that lived in his very blood, which he refused to use when it was not forced upon him. 

“I’m not taking any more blame I don’t deserve, Albus; I took it for twelve years, I’m not taking it anymore.” He didn’t remember if he had ever called Dumbledore by his first name. “When you depart I’ll ward off the Floo. Not that it’ll keep you out. But I’d appreciate an owl in warning given I’m rather skittish these days.” 

Dumbledore stood drawing himself to his full imperious height and he swept toward the fireplace with a rather cryptic look over his shoulder at Remus in the window. “Do take your potion.” 

He knew already that he would especially if Greyback was back in Britain which he supposed had been part of Dumbledore’s grand plan all along. “I’ll think about it,” he said, and Dumbledore smiled, his raw conniving smile; the fireplace flared green out of years-old ash, and he was gone. 

Remus grabbed Sirius’s wand and went to the hearth instantly to block off the Floo. Of course the fireplace was off-network but it could still be warded, though it meant whoever tried to come through it was in for a nasty surprise. Of course while he knelt there in the old ashes trying to remember the multiplicity of spells they had put on the doors and windows and the fireplace in the Chalk Farm flat Sirius came in the door; his hands were muddy up to the elbow and the breeze that came through with him smelled like impending rain. The residual resonance around him from all his digging was like a pale halo. He heard the radio first — “Wow,” he said, “Moony, Sonic Youth… what station is this?” 

“I don’t know,” Remus told him, “they were playing Bowie before this. Dumbledore was here.” 

Sirius’s eyes grew three sizes. “The Floo’s off-network.” 

“Yes well, it didn’t stop him, and I can’t remember that spell, you know the, like the cushion for the chimney.” 

“It’s _aerpulvinus_ ,” Sirius said, coming to crouch beside him on the hearth, “it’s the same spell you’d use if you were being hanged, in fact…” 

“He wants us to put wards up as Greyback’s crossed the Channel.” 

The name tasted in his mouth like ash. The whole sentence he had to spit out. He could feel Sirius beside him bristle. Certainly his eyes had by now grown four to six sizes. Something in Remus’s belly was twisting tightly as if wrung. _Don’t fucking puke_ , he thought, as though it were a spell. 

“Is he certain,” said Sirius. Something raw and ugly in his voice. 

“Yes, he’s — the bites, the — ” He paused, swallowed bile. His vision spun. “They were children.” 

He had rehearsed it, in the caves and upon the cold ground in the Forest when he could not sleep: Dumbledore told me information at any cost and I figured if it was all our lives in the balance the cost wasn’t so bad and then he said, Black birds, and I shut my eyes, and my head turned off, and I didn’t feel anything, and I thought, I should stop pretending like I belong. Like you loving me was like a cobweb that wrapped me up and I could not see the spider in the corner waiting until I ceased to struggle. And at last I realized I had it all backwards very much too late to mean anything. 

Sirius exhaled heavily through his nose and stood and so help him Remus remembered, how strange it had always been, all the sex after, and he could never place what made it feel like that: different, hollow; Sirius’s hands were cold, and he always wanted to look Remus in the eyes, as though they could communicate with each other just inside their heads, and sometimes he couldn’t bear it. Can’t you look inside us both, he wanted to say, he wanted to grab Sirius by the ears and scream it; can’t you glean from all of this, from all the opacity and the lies, we share a monstrosity, and thus we are not the kind of people who make love to one another with tenderness? 

He reached into the earth for the resonance which had become a sort of reflex and aimed Sirius’s wand up the chimney: “ _Aerpulvinus._ ” When he stood his knees cracked. Sirius had turned away from him and covered his mouth with his hand. 

“I’ll ward the South shore,” Remus said. “Can I still use your — ”

“Yes,” said Sirius, “yes, fine.” 

He went out into the cool and brilliant afternoon and the fragrant salt breeze off the strait. Everything brought back upon him now he had staved off in there and for what? _You will never kill your master — you will never kill the rat —_

Perhaps it was the moon in him, and the fear, filtering his blood; he wished, he wished he had crunched all its tiny bones. His hands were shaking and it was only a matter of time before he puked; something in his stomach was roiling nastily, and it would not get much better at all, because he would have to take the potion, and he would have to unsleep beside Sirius in that bed with the knowing and the unknowing… and this time it would not seize him, not even for a night of relief from his mind, and he hated, most of all, that piece of him that begged to have it — to be swallowed, to be taken. 

Of course he remembered the wards. The wards, the wards, the wards; checking on them every day, testing their strength and their resilience, fearing and yearningly imagining what would happen if one evening they did not let Sirius in. He drew from himself and the resonance through Sirius’s wand which was friendly yet recalcitrant. The waves and the sea. The wedging bleeding corner of the moon in the afternoon sky. 

\--

The next afternoon he managed to tune the radio to 88.6fm which played a kind of roundtable talk show at which numerous heavily-accented participants discussed _Quibbler_ -caliber “news.” He listened while he made dinner (grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato slices and mustard) for himself and Sirius. He knew the potion would go down easier if he had something else in his stomach but likely it would be difficult to eat knowing what was coming. When he heard one of the panelists mention nargles he turned the radio off and arranged the sandwiches on two plates with apple slices ( _housewife_ , said a piece of his brain; _you are turning into your mother_ ) and carried them both outside into the coming dusk. 

Sirius had said that morning he was just about at 10 AD in mapping the henge’s spell history. He was sitting at the North edge of the circle cross-legged with his eyes shut. Remus had never gotten far enough into the Hogwarts magical theory program to know much about the actual practice of source coding and spell history. He saw Sirius had set up some kind of contraption that was working by itself: a quill writing very quickly upon a sheet of parchment. It took Remus a moment of study to figure out the text was spellwords, because they weren’t Latinate, which meant — ancient Celtic, maybe, or one of the runic tongues… but this was among much knowledge snatched from him, sucked and scraped from his brain like the guts of a melon. 

He sat and ate his grilled cheese and apples slowly with breaks for deep breaths when the nausea wrung his gut and watched the sun dip ever lower and listened to the quill scratching upon the parchment and wondered what was happening and how it was happening and what would happen if he tried to say one of the spells. Probably nothing, or something apocalyptic. He thought about forcible harnessing, about reigning in, and he watched the light fade over the bones of the church. Everything wizards and men and Christians and white people had colonized and standardized into friendliness — how the rest of it was historical jetsam. His fate, perhaps, if lycanthropy was as malleable as language. He felt neither powerful nor lucky nor resentful nor any of it to be living when by now by all rights he should have cashed it in. The nurses in the wizarding clinic in Glastonbury had told his parents, 1965, it would be somewhat of a mercy if he did not wake up. 

Remus warmed Sirius’s grilled cheese with magic twice before the quill stopped scratching at dusk and Sirius opened his eyes. “How long have you been — ” His voice was rough from silence and he coughed to reset it. “How long have you been sitting there?” 

“Just a bit. Reading the spells. How deep did you get?” 

“900 BC or so.” He took a wolfish tearing bite of the grilled cheese. He had not come in for lunch. 

“I fixed the radio.” 

“Oh,” said Sirius, “great.” 

It was like some very very bad stalemate chess game neither of them would give up on. They went inside and Sirius looked through his notes at the table while Remus choked down the first round of Wolfsbane gulp by gulp trying hard not to meet the strange and curious eyes until they looked up no more. He rinsed the bottle in the sink and went to the bed to lie down and close his eyes, until the deja vu crept up on him and he could not be certain where he was. 

\--

On the full moon day he woke with all his joints aching and through the window he could see Sirius out at the henge setting up his quill contraption. He made toast but couldn’t eat it. He listened to the radio, and read _Catch-22_ , and at last he took the final dose of the potion, and Sirius came down from the hill to clean up the table and tuck all his paperwork into the top cabinet. 

“You don’t have to do any of that this time,” Remus said. He could feel some of himself fraying but not all of it. “It’s um, it’s me. You don’t even have to put the dog on.” 

Sirius’s brow tightened. “Are you sure?” 

Perhaps he feared Dumbledore had switched the potion out for sinister reasons but it didn’t matter whether Sirius distrusted Remus or Dumbledore or both; still it hurt. “How about you start, with the dog on, and then — you’ll be able to tell it’s me.” 

_Does Sirius put you outside and lock the door?_

Politely the dog kept its head down while he undressed. It was another sort of imagined slight; they hadn’t been embarrassed to be naked around each other since second or third year. But perhaps he was so different now — so stripped of self — that he seemed like a stranger. There was no skin left to him that Sirius had touched or kissed at Hogwarts or in London… And after all it was a funny lucky thing, he thought, smudging out, that he still had a body at all; that it was whole still when nothing else was; that it was so whole there were two of it. Even with its excess of skin and bone it worked and it worked well enough to become another. 

His head hurt. His bones hurt… he sat on the floor and hugged his knees. The dog nosed his shoulder, and then his ribs, and the gentle touch of the cold nose was so uncanny-familiar, so divided and removed, he thought it might bring him to tears. It was all too blurry to even consider the nuance of what he had done wrong but he recalled — behind his eyes the sick rotting fluorescence of it, of the lie and the silent truth, chewing at him, like insects… It was not something he could bury; he had lost whatever skill he had once had for compartmentalization; it had been vacuumed out of his mind when they opened every last door inside it. All that he could do to heal this rift between them and in himself was tell Sirius the truth but he never had before, and it had festered terribly in thirteen years… and to say it would make it true, and it would open it to interpretation and thus to judgement. He recalled Dumbledore’s flippancy in ’79 in St. Mungo’s; he knew he couldn’t take that from Sirius. _Does he put you outside and lock the door_? 

The dregs of the light faded from the threshold, he took a last deep breath, and thence came the twisting. 

It was strange to be wrung through it and to keep his mind after over a year of guilty blissful dissolving. To feel intimately the stretching and the shoving and the inside-outness — his teeth grinding inside his skull. The sharpening of his nails and canine teeth. His back reshaped as if by two cosmic hands molding some new creature out of existing and unpliant materials. He could hear the sounds he made slip all-too-slowly across the threshold from human to animal until at last it was over. 

In the monochrome shadow the black dog watched him and its eyes were wide and nervous. It looked older than it had in the seventies, mature and grave and a bit grey about the muzzle; always like an omen of death, but now rather calm and sweet, subdued, inevitable. He wished he remembered what he was supposed to do — what was normal. Sirius had always said they ran around together and snarled and snapped and playfought and he would say in the morning, I know it’s you in there, I know it. After the first time, James and Peter had gone to Arithmancy, and they walked together, late, to Muggle Studies (Sirius was taking it possibly solely to mock his parents), and Remus had planned to try and say something like, we can’t do that again, it’s too dangerous, because he had woken up tasting blood in his mouth with the three of them clustered around him on the bed in the Shack like occupants of a surgical theater and for a moment he had been certain of the worst and the inevitable, and then Sirius had turned to him in the empty corridor: “Moony,” he said, his eyes were bright and uncertain, and there was something in them (pity?) that Remus didn’t quite like, “when we, you looked at me, you saw me, and you recognized me.” He didn’t know what to say, and he wasn’t certain how it could be, and he felt scraped rather raw, and he itched under his bandages. Sirius’s face was so close to his face he could smell toothpaste and Earl Grey tea. “You’re somewhere in there,” he said, like he was looking for it right then, in Remus’s face in the shadow in the hallway, “I know.” He made it one among his many missions for years to prove it and now Remus supposed it had been proven. There was indeed some thread of himself in it that could be coaxed out with a brew of poison. It was altogether a shame something poetic like love didn’t do it. 

He sat on his haunches and licked under the dog’s chin. A canine measure of deference, he recalled; Sirius was always doing it to him in the blood-tasting full moon dawn and after late ’77 sometimes he would even do it as a human, at other junctures, broom closets on the way to class, behind the drawn velvet hangings of Remus’s bed when late at night often influenced by smuggled firewhiskey or pot he would gather the chutzpah to sneak in. The fact of his mouth pressed upon the pulse vampiric and suffocating and sometimes enough Remus thought _god god please bite it — please have me —_

Sirius who knew it seemed every truth of him but one and that one enough to call the rest into question. _Change back_ , Remus thought desperately, as though they could communicate this way. _It’s me. You were right. It’s me_. 

The black dog looked at him for a moment and then slipped toward the door and out into the spreading night and Remus followed. They ran together across the tarn toward the henge which in this self felt strange, searing bright and itchy in the moonlight through the sheaf of cloud. The island wasn’t big enough to run and he was tired — he had been so tired. And in front of him the dog like a black shape cut out of night but for the pink pads of its paws and its eyes which were Sirius’s grey when it turned its face to Remus and then away again toward the sea. In a removed desperation he went to the dog and licked its chin again and deep inside its chest it growled. 

Startled he stepped back and snapped and the dog snapped back and they squared around one another snarling in the moonlit darkness like a Mexican standoff out of an old Western movie until Remus feinted and Sirius lunged at him with paws scrabbling in the sandy soil and at last for real they fought both drawing blood with claws and teeth until they retreated after some interminable span to opposite sides of the island to lick their wounds. Of course it would happen this way, he thought, limping, of course, of course, he was still an animal. It was prettier to think his violence was knit to the unconscious thread of the other but in fact it was not — it had suffused him entire. He lay on his stomach with his jaw pressed against the earth. Deep in there somewhere almost untouchable he thought he felt something. 

\--

He slept to unfocus the pain and his mind’s ravaging and he woke when the dawn light struck him and rent him back into his body and at last he sat up slowly and inspected the damage. Two of his fingernails were missing from the root and bleeding and one of his teeth felt loose and his head was pounding and Sirius, who had already dressed and showered by the state of his hair, was coming up from the cottage with what looked like a cup of coffee. 

“There’s whiskey in it,” he called when he got closer, but then he stopped and hesitated, as if Remus were still contagious. “Are you alright?” 

“Yes,” he said, hugging his knees to his chest, “are you alright?” 

Sirius crouched at his side and pressed the mug into his hands. “We’ve done worse to one another before.” They had, fifth year, just after the Event; he had had to repair three of Sirius’s teeth, which had shattered, and there was a bite like a foxtrap around Remus’s own ankle that cut down to the bone. They were also both cut up with scrapes and deep gouges where James had attempted to pull them apart with his fucking antlers. “Let me fix your — ” 

He held his hand over Remus’s on the coffee mug and when he pulled away the missing fingernails had grown back. _How_ , he thought, he almost said. Unless something drastic had changed in his years in Azkaban this was quite simply not how magic worked. But he was not sure he wanted to hear the answer. Sirius met his eyes and between them the vastness of the uncommunicated like a black sea — an endless gulf, a gulf of years. 

Without another word Sirius went to the henge and set up his things and Remus finished the coffee and fought to his feet (bending double at first for a moment, head slamming, vision blackening); he went to the cottage and drank the vial of painkiller potion Sirius had left for him upon the table alongside a plate of blackened toast he didn’t touch, and then he went down to the sea. The sting of the salt in the various wounds felt almost baptismal, absolving, and the cold possessing, nearly sweet. He dunked his head underwater and screamed, tasting his own anger, blood, brine… He understood if he just lifted his feet from the ground the current would carry him under and elsewhere. But he was already buoyed up by another current stronger still. 

It would not be warm enough to swim much longer. He sat on the beach and worried at the loose-feeling tooth with his tongue for an hour or so before he went back up to the cottage and fixed it with Sirius’s wand, which he had left upon the table. 


	5. Chapter 5

Sometime in the war, late in ’79, Sirius thought he remembered, they had shared with one another their recurring nightmares. It was a Sunday afternoon and the sky was dark and threatened snow and all that day they had only left the bedroom to fetch the previous night’s leftover curry from the fridge. There were crumbs in the bed, and sticky spots, and one of Remus’s sweaters was tangled up with the sheets at the foot of it. He had agreed to meet with a vampire band in Newcastle in a few days’ time but before he did it was his turn to do laundry. As for Sirius he had been recently summoned as a first responder to a Death Eater killing in Bexleyheath and had done the spell history for the Auror department records as around him a crew scrubbed blood from the walls. Afterwards he brought takeout Chinese home for himself and Remus but couldn’t eat it and cried in the shower until at last Remus came in and turned the water off (it had gone cold) and brought him to bed. Neither of them were the sort of people who held each other in their sleep and in fact Remus hated to be spooned but after the Bexleyheath event which was sort of the second symptom of the Very Badness after, of course, Remus’s mauling in France, sometimes Sirius would wake up in the night to pee and he would struggle to extract himself from Remus’s arms. Remus’s ponderous sleeping breath against the back of his neck and Remus’s palm pressed over his heartbeat. 

It didn’t seem fair because Remus still seemed a bit fragile from the events of December ’78, only half the scars had yet faded to white, and after all it had not been very long since his parents had died. Sirius brought him takeout and chocolate and records like a bird with offerings and shoplifted particularly detailed issues of _Amortentia_ , a magazine nominally for witches laden with sex tips — _pleasure enhancing spells: how to blow your man’s mind with easy magic!_ — only about 12% of which Sirius dared attempt. Gone, he figured bittersweetly, were the days of their vigorous, hedonistic, vengeful fucking to the tune of _Led Zeppelin 4,_ the sort of fucking that was basically fighting, fingers in each other’s mouths, excessive teeth, and he suspected Remus purposefully cut his nails raggedly, and he would take pride in coaxing these delicious fragmenting sounds from Remus’s throat and his open mouth, and then he would whisper, _shh, shh, shh_ … now they didn’t listen to music at all, or sometimes they listened to this ambient Brian Eno tape Remus had borrowed from Frank Longbottom and never returned, and he moved inside Remus slowly and Remus’s thighs wrapped his hips, rough calluses at his heels pressing Sirius’s ass and thighs or the small of his back, and there was much kissing and gentle touching and a pretty ear-ringing silence intercut by breath and heartbeats and the little sounds Remus made when he got close, and afterward sometimes Sirius found himself possessed by this swarming heavy black feeling like a funeral shroud but cold, which was the feeling that Remus had almost died, that very nearly he had been very lost forever, and on these occasions he would sling Remus’s knees over his shoulders and eat him out, sometimes until he cried; he figured it was this sort of desperate attempt to communicate what he could not say, what he was frightened to say, which was, you are so preciously pricelessly valuable, you are a work of art in a fireproof bunker, you are a saint’s relic in a living body, I worse than love you, I would do anything anything anything for you… 

They were old men; they were nineteen, or perhaps by then Sirius was twenty, but Remus was nineteen, and they were lying in bed and it was a Sunday afternoon and they had eaten the leftover curry but Sirius was still hungry, and his mouth tasted like India spices, and like Remus’s skin. “I’ve been having,” he said, “this dream.” 

Remus was dozing and when Sirius spoke his eyes opened and almost reluctantly the lenses of them focused. “Hmm?” 

Under the blanket their shins were pressed together and their knees. Through the window with the cold draught came the winter city sounds and Sirius already was dreading Monday at the Ministry. Remus had one lost eyelash against his cheek amidst the pale freckles like a sort of artful backward comma. Sirius couldn’t think of a wish for it (there were too many possible wishes), so he left it alone. “Do you ever have the same dream over and over?” 

“Yes,” Remus said. His brow furrowed with a vague and tender concern. “It’s almost like a memory but longer and less detailed and scarier now in retrospect.” 

He had told Sirius probably sixth year what he recalled of Greyback’s initial bite, ’65, on the Somerset moor. Just before dusk his parents had sent him down the road to borrow a cup of sugar from a neighbor. In those days the street the Lupins lived on wasn’t paved and there were no streetlights nor sidewalks and Remus said he heard footsteps behind him on the bare gravel a few times and turned only to see nothing. When he did not return after an hour his parents had searched the fields with flashlights and wands shouting his name. His mother carried him home in her arms, limp and bleeding, his father Floo’d the Auror department, who sent Alastor Moody, the rest was history. He had told Sirius he had a dream that was much the same except in the dream he knew who pursued him and he understood he was being hunted. Sirius wondered if it was the same even now or if perhaps after the events in France it had changed somewhat; he feared the answer. He hated how much certainly horrible history he ached to know. “What’s your dream,” Remus said. 

Sirius felt his dreams were typical for an Auror: always he was dropped into them running (they had practiced running out of Apparition first week of basic training) and he ran and ran sometimes through the forest and sometimes the subway tunnels or the wet city streets and sometimes down the road to the Lupins’ cottage in Somerset and sometimes through the rooms and corridors of Grimmauld Place and when at last he was spat free of the maze wherever he was deposited bore the shimmering snake-face of the Dark Mark burning like a wicker man against the swarming darkness. He had seen it in his dreams above Hogwarts and above the Chalk Farm flat and above the Potters’ family home in Lincolnshire and James and Lily’s house, which in those days was near Nottingham, above the flats of all the Order members strewn haphazardly above dive bars and takeout joints and drug fronts across London, and he had begun to fixate on it as a sort of horrible premonition, or like some kind of external oneiromancy, which later in the dark years he wondered about from time to time. 

After the war the dream dispersed and was replaced by others and as such he had not had it in nearly thirteen years when it came back to him like a lost dog in the Eynhallow cottage. He heard the spell as he ran down the hill from the henge — _morsmordre!_ — a low voice, almost a growl, not quite human, and then a crack of Apparition; when he reached the threshold of the cottage he saw beyond it in the darkness a rime of spilt blood congealing in the vivid moonlight. Magic was shoving desperately at his fingertips with his heartbeat and his head slamming… He dared a step inside — dared a look toward the bed — 

He woke up in it when Remus shook his shoulder. At first he thought maybe he had come down with a fever such did his skin feel burning. Remus took a wary step back like away from a spitting potion he had cocked up spectacularly, and Sirius sat up, thinking he would find a cool cloth for his forehead; in doing so did he realize the sickly feeling was in fact his magic having returned with a vengeance. 

\--

Deeper in the source coding of the henge (toward the end of the first millennium BC) were pockets of strangeness he spent hours probing simply so as not to have to sit at the kitchen table having dinner in silence with Remus, whose burst of talkativeness had wound back down to a familiar cold recalcitrance after Dumbledore’s visitation and revelation, and the following full moon. He watched with a vacant curiosity as Sirius did everything by magic he had done the Muggle way for the previous months and in his own mind Sirius dared him to ask. If he asked they could speak about it and perhaps speaking about it would clear the air; perhaps a fight more vocal than their scuffle on the full moon would clear the air; after all it had before. It was too much, much too much, for it to be back like this and for it to have come back in the circumstances it had and now to know that the source of all this to begin with had returned to England for reasons that now seemed just out of reach. But if Remus would not speak about it neither would he. He knew it was immature but wasn’t sure what his other options were; it also seemed gauche to interrogate with regard to an obscure sexually transmitted disease a man who was still self-reassembling after twelve years of wrongful imprisonment and emotional torture. But he supposed the Blackest threads of him, the ancestral anger and jealousy he had inherited with the dark hair and the grey eyes, would not consider Remus fully innocent until this too was explained. 

Source coding into the Iron Age was customarily undertaken in order to discern neolithic use, former compulsions, ritual context, et cetera, but much of the magic Sirius noted constituted ancient warding and warning spells, protections he didn’t recognize — some repeated over and over bracketing gestural work inscribed in jagged runes, the magic language of the unnamed culture of farmers who had built Skara Brae and Barnhouse and buried their dead at Maeshowe facing the winter solstice sunset. Common understanding in the field was that they had not understood much of what they could do and chalked it up to intervention by the divine but Sirius did not quite buy it, nor the Muggle solution, which was worship of the dead, the sun, or both. All of the work at the henge was purposeful and though it was not without superstition (hence the warding) its repetition with but a few choice edits and additions as time went on seemed to indicate it was directed toward some demonstrable result. 

He took up his old schedule, working at night and sleeping in the day, in order to avoid sharing the bed with Remus, and so that he could be uninterrupted and undistracted at the kitchen table with his research through about twelve different runic dictionaries he had to have shipped from Hogwarts storage. At last in one of the more obscure texts ( _Hunter-Gatherer Runic Text of Prehistoric Northern Scotland_ ) he found what he thought he was looking for; it was three AM, and the waning moon bleeding across the floor, and in the bedroom Remus was dreaming, soft dreaming sounds. He did not talk in his sleep anymore nor did he wake up screaming but more than once Sirius had seen him crying. 

According to the dictionary the magicked quill Sirius had set up in the Silcox Method had dictated over and over again a spell series from around 3000 to 1500 BC: 

_Protection (from those outside a given clan)_

_Protection (from elements)_

_Protection (from sight, proto-Disillusionment)_

_General cursebreaking prefix (indicates that the following spell series is used to disrupt another, previously cast, usually malevolent, form of magic)_

_Emancipation (as from slave owner; later used by serfs in reference to landed gentry. With slavery rare in hunter-gatherer cultures it is thought use of the rune originates in contexts relating to other forms of human ownership and servitude eg. marriage or service to a chieftain)_

_Independence (also translated as ‘self sufficiency’)_

_Freedom (note that imagery of rune suggests bird taking flight, suggesting a sense of new acquisition — freedom seized or acted upon, sense of activity)_

_Protection lifted_

_Protection lifted_

_Protection lifted_

Sirius jotted a few notes on the subject ( _Site used for divorces? Language / connotation is positive ie. likely not exiles. Could be rituals relating to death eg. shuffling off this mortal coil? Twelve miles from Maeshowe. Remember to check heelstone orientation around the winter solstice_ ) and then, royally lost, feeling dizzy with a kind of excess of time, too much knowledge and not enough, he owled Riley Song. 

\--

In the Shack in June: when Remus woke he rasped, “Where is he?” He tried to sit but couldn’t until Sirius helped him up and wrapped the wool blanket around him. The moth-eaten holes in the loose knit showed the fresh bruising at Remus’s collar and shoulders from throwing himself against the door and the yellow-green eyes were just unfocused and there was blood in his mouth; he’d bitten through his tongue. All the strange weight of memory. Various and sundry still unexplained and all the fear and the anger and the shock of it and still it felt strange to be here in this place with Remus who smelt like blood in the summer dawn and not to hold his hand. 

“Dumbledore has him up at the castle.” 

“Dumbledore — ”

“We’re heading up there in just a minute,” Sirius said, pressing the vase into Remus’s hand, “here’s the Portkey, can you hold on?” 

Remus hooked one finger (like a bone awl) cautiously in the mouth of the vase and Sirius watched his eyes focus and study him and the moment froze in amber… he might’ve touched the bony white bend of Remus’s knee (he had tattooed himself also over the scars at the crease of his thigh with the sigil, _do not disturb_ , he had marked it everywhere, Sirius noticed, like a lesson, itself like an ancient runic inscription, wishful gestural spellwork; don’t open this, don’t open this, erase this memory), but Remus looked away. “What’s going to happen,” he said. It was hardly a question. It was, will they have Dementors waiting for me there. 

“I don’t know. He’ll send us somewhere safe.” 

Remus held a little tighter to the vase but he looked rather skeptical. “Sirius,” he said; his voice cracked a little, and their eyes met, and something — that same old strange something — took a first struggling breath between them, “you can’t trust him.” 

Sirius was going to tell him, I already know, but the force of the Portkey gripped them both, tugged through space, and deposited them by the fireplace in Dumbledore’s office. The vase shattered upon the flagstones and from behind his desk Dumbledore Vanished the shards. He was smiling up at them from over the wire rims of his pince-nez in a way that did not reach his eyes. Remus held the wool blanket tighter around himself, hiding the bruises. 

“What happened to Pettigrew?” Sirius asked, and Dumbledore indicated a repurposed golden birdcage resting on one of the poufy chintz armchairs (in which, in their youth, they had been frequently lectured), containing the rat who yearned desperately into each tiny gap in the wire in search of an escape route. From his perch the phoenix, adolescent now, shimmering expression of brilliant red plumage vivid in the pale gaslight, eyed the tiny rodent with a curious hunger. Sirius heard Remus’s deep shaky breath, the tight ponderous clench of his jaw; no doubt it pained him to so much as stand. 

“I will take him to the Ministry in a few hours,” Dumbledore said, observing them, their disarray, Remus’s bare knees like knobs carven of bone or burl wood shot through with strange patterning. “They are expecting me… I can also see what securities I can finagle for you, Remus, how good to see you in this — radically unfamiliar scenario.” 

Remus’s jaw unstuck with a sound, and he said, “Likewise.” 

“Are the kids alright?” 

“Yes, yes, they woke up about an hour ago with nine thousand questions I don’t believe any of us have the answers to.” Dumbledore smiled. “As did our dear friend Peter who’s rather quick as a rodent… Fawkes here grabbed him right by the scruff of his neck on his way into my pantry… no doubt after my collection of chocolate frogs…” 

Remus’s hands in the blanket were tight white fists beset with ink and scars. He dared an uninterpretable glance at Sirius in his periphery. 

“Anyway,” Dumbledore said, “I’ve found an opportunity for you both to recover in safety while this is straightened out. And of course for you to finish that book, Sirius…” He passed a sealed roll of parchment across his desk stamped with the signet of the magical theory graduate program at Oxford. “One of the department heads owed me a favor of rather gigantic magnitude and as such I’ve accrued for you a highly selective research grant to work on the uninhabited Orkney island of Eynhallow source coding the oldest known stone circle in neolithic Britain.” He looked rather delightedly pleased with himself; his bushy eyebrows had propped his up on his forehead. Remus half turned to Sirius with a kind of stretching grimace of uncertainty. “You will find it not irrelevant to your work, both of you,” Dumbledore went on, “and besides, there’s a one hundred galleon stipend a month, and I’ve already had the kitchen elves pack you up enough food for two weeks; I’m certain you’re both hungry…” 

“I suppose then you just need to get us out of the way,” Remus said bluntly. 

“You suppose right,” said Dumbledore, emboldened to put the same tone on. “This is altogether — a bad time for the unexpected even if the unexpected is, ah — ” He studied Remus’s face, which had twisted; Remus’s bitter brutal eyes and wild hair, his clenched jaw, the scar across his face, symbol and conjecture — “is well-deserved.” 

“What about Remus’s pardon, then,” Sirius asked. 

Dumbledore’s eyes flicked between them. “I will do my best. At the very least this is an opportunity to call off Dementors and MLE… and besides Eynhallow is very thoroughly protected… the existence of the stone circle itself is basically secret-kept by the department at Oxford who claim full jurisdiction over the site. And they have on file it is occupied for the summer by one Sirius Black, distinguished professor of magical theory at Hogwarts.” 

“And how long — ”

“The grant is for one year’s study. After that if we still need — we may have to find some other one. Which I should be able to finagle, as that department head at Oxford still owes me.” 

What in hell, Sirius wanted to ask, is happening? 

“Go to your chambers, Sirius, and fetch the things you need,” Dumbledore instructed. “Everything you can’t pack I’ll have the house elves put in storage in the dungeons… Remus and I will prepare the Portkey.” 

It was rather like when Dumbledore had come to the hospital to ask Remus questions about his time in Brittany and he had sent Sirius and James and Lily away, except this time Remus had spent twelve years in hell, not a month, and the miracle of his escape had been somewhat less well-received. He clasped Remus’s shoulder over the wool blanket (narrow and sharp with bone) and Remus only flinched a little, and so delicately Sirius could hope Dumbledore hadn’t noticed. “I’ll get you some clothes,” he said. 

He walked so quickly through the castle back to his rooms he got a stitch in his side halfway up the stairs but yet any hope he had of returning post-haste was pretty much immediately shot down by one Harry Potter who was sitting at his desk in his prized swivel chair, arms crossed and brow furrowed expectantly. Sirius was not altogether surprised; the kid impressed him at every turn with his dogged questing for Answers and general Jamesian disregard for authority and rules. “Hullo,” said Sirius, wrenching open his magically extended armoire and digging out his duffel bags. “Happy to talk but I also have to — ” 

“You’re leaving?” 

Though he had technically quit in the Shack, part of him reasoned, he didn’t necessarily have to leave… but yet if he did he couldn’t be certain what Dumbledore would do with Remus. How royally everything had changed in twenty-four hours. “Yes,” Sirius told Harry, “yes, unfortunately, it’s rather out of my control, and I wish I wasn’t. But — ”

“It isn’t Lupin, is it. Who betrayed my parents.” 

He didn’t even ask how Harry knew about that. Certainly Sirius hadn’t told him but then certainly the knowledge was rather common to anyone who had read the wartime _Prophet_. It was probably Lucius Malfoy’s ferrety spawn. “No, it isn’t.” 

“But you thought it was.” 

“Harry, everyone thought it was. There was — ” Conjecture, and convincing. “There was evidence.” 

“Well then who was the man in the rat?” 

“Peter Pettigrew; he was your parents’ secret keeper. So, only he knew where you all were living, toward the end, in Godric’s Hollow. It’s a very complicated spell. Remus was sort of the decoy secret keeper, you know, only he and your parents would’ve known really it was Peter, but then, all of us, even me and Dumbledore, thought it was Remus, so he took the fall. It was altogether this big setup, because they knew there was a spy and they thought it was me.” 

Harry looked at him across his desk with its strewn papers and stacked books and sticky plates of long-disappeared cinnamon buns nicked from the kitchen and as yet unreturned. Sirius shut the armoire, having shoved half of his Muggle clothes in tangles into a duffel and gleefully abandoning his academic robes, and started in on the bookshelf. “Trust your friends, Harry,” he said, “do that for me, alright?” 

“Alright,” Harry said, voice a little choked, like he was trying not to cry. “Hermione really wanted to take your class.” 

“If she writes to me we can do it via owl order,” Sirius said, turning toward Harry, but he had turned toward the window. “You can always write to me. Literally every minute of every day you can write to me if you want.” 

“Okay.” 

“I’m your godfather,” Sirius said, or rather blurted, he hadn’t mentioned it before, and Harry turned his big wet Lilyish eyes toward him for a minute and then back to the window again. “So it’s my legal — it’s my responsibility under some statute of magical law. I’ll write to you first thing when we get there so you have the address.” 

“Where are you going?” 

“Dumbledore’s sending us to a henge in Orkney on a research grant in my name. I don’t know if they can turn in Peter. They might want to pretend we still don’t know. If they do that they can’t call off the Dementors or the MLE who are looking for Remus.” 

“But he’s innocent!” 

“Yes, yes he is. So we have to hide. Just for now.” You’ll grow up, probably very soon, Sirius wanted to say, and you’ll realize bad things happen to the undeserving more often than not. “Something’s coming, Harry, things are changing, or rather going back to how they were, I don’t know how so yet. But if you and Ron and Hermione can be my eyes and ears here at Hogwarts we might figure out sooner than later.” 

With the books packed he gathered the paperwork from his desk and Harry helped him, kind enough to not say anything about the empty scotch bottles rolling and clinking against each other in the bottom left drawer. “I have to — Harry, I’m so sorry. I wish I could — we could sit down and just talk about it though it would probably take six hours.” 

“Why not now?” 

He could not tell Harry — not yet — that he didn’t trust Dumbledore, with Remus or with anything, especially not after all that had happened. “We’re taking a Portkey, soon I bet; definitely this morning, before the end-of-year feast.” He tested both his duffels; luckily the spells he’d put on them years ago, for lightening and undetectable extension, had held up. “You and Ron and Hermione should loot this place before the house elves come to bring it all to storage,” he said, “I have some, some great records and tapes and very esoteric books — ”

Harry stood and hugged him with such force he dropped both duffels. He was trying very hard not to cry and so was Sirius after about ten seconds; his own actions in part had robbed this child of a family, and even despite all that Sirius, who was perhaps the only reasonable adult in Harry’s life, did not dare tell him his greatest hero and most profound influencer was the conniving chessmaster who had possibly engineered at least half of it all to begin with. “Write to me,” he said, choking something back, “alright, promise me.” 

“I promise,” Harry said, letting go, squeezing the bridge of his nose between two fingers, the way James had when he wanted to say something he couldn’t vocalize lest he lose it with weeping or with shouting or with both. “Can I write to, to Lupin too?” 

“Yes,” Sirius answered, wanting almost to scream, this was how it was supposed to have been; Harry was supposed to have been at Hogwarts writing letters, _Dear Sirius and Remus_ , _Dear Moony and Padfoot_ … “Yes, he would like that.” 

They hugged again and said goodbye and he left Harry to look through his tapes and went down with his duffels through the halls to Dumbledore’s office. This early the castle was still nearly silent though now intercut with the occasional hungover shade of a student eking his or her way ever toward the kitchens in search of a greasy sandwich or a bottle of ginger beer. When he reached the gargoyle statue at Dumbledore’s office door the soft voices he heard from inside silenced when he spoke the password. Remus was sitting in one of the armchairs wrapped in the blanket looking on the verge of passing out with exhaustion; the expression that shifted across his face when he saw Sirius in the door was not quite relief but it was something adjacent. _At last_ , said the look, the way he looked sometimes, ’80, ’81, when he would come home from wherever Dumbledore sent him and crawl into bed to sleep even if it was ten in the morning, _at last, at last_. 

“Your Portkey,” Dumbledore said, pressing a deflated Quaffle into Sirius’s hands. “Pardon me, it was the first thing I could find. Departs in — ” He checked his watch. “Four minutes.” 

“Cutting it close,” said Sirius. Neither Remus nor Dumbledore responded. 

They stood together toward the hearth where they had arrived at dawn, Remus holding the extended knapsack from the kitchens, swaying on his feet, Sirius with the duffels, Quaffle clasped between them, and Sirius thought, heart pounding, please let this be real, please let it take us somewhere safe, please let me not wake up from this dream — 

It seized them both and this time the squeeze was longer, protracted and tight, breathless for a single heartbeat moment of panic, and then it dropped them bodily on a windblown green patch, just this side of livable, embedded like a burnished emerald jewel in the sound, halfway between the cottage and the henge’s golden thread lacing through the earth and through them investigatory and curious. Remus fell to his knees and at first Sirius thought he might kiss the ground; instead he dry-heaved thrice, spat something thick and coughed something else, and Sirius helped him up, helped him inside, sat him down gingerly on the single moldy bed; this, he thought, feeling the deep ancient threading of the henge, the warmth of the breeze, the sea smell and the birdcalls, this, for better or worse, for sickness or health, this is how it’s going to be from now on… 

\--

_Can’t write much on the subject for fear of reprisal from scoop-hungry professors at St. Andrews,_ Riley responded in just three days’ time, her handwriting rushed, _but we have an artifact here w similar source coding from around same time period but from Funnelbeaker culture in Denmark… Do you have a feel for compulsion? It’s a bit chicken or egg, is it not? I can tell you — and here is where I am wishing for more diversity in these programs — I am trying to theorize it is lycanthropic in origin due to lunar and lupine symbology but no one here is hearing me on the subject… Anyway let me know what you uncover and talk soon — RMS_

Sirius crumpled her letter in a fist then regretted it and smoothed it flat again against the table. He remembered for the first time Yates’s story from Remus’s seventh year project: _relinquo servitutem — et libertas mea —_

Perhaps this was what Dumbledore had meant by _not irrelevant._ It seemed nothing at all was coincidental in this grand escapade. He had the magic now to attempt deep terramancy which might confirm the theory, if anything was left buried here that hadn’t yet rotted away. 

He got a quick owl off to Yates on the subject and then he made some further notes: 

_Exorcism-type conceptuality vis a vis banishing/freeing the possessor through (key concept) COMMUNITY ritual? Lycanthropy treatment/cure even as theory/conceptuality?_

_Selfhood / independence / liberation from master/father/slaveowner as compulsion? If thus when/why/how was it removed? Connection to church? Eg. dismantling of ancient quasi-religious power encouraging rejection of patriarch… seems to fit (to study spell history)_

_Varied understandings of lycanthropy culturally/temporally? Do we know anything about neolithic lycanthropy? First recorded cases? in Europe / UK?_

If only there were a real live werewolf presently in the bed in the next room, or if only Sirius could summon the chutzpah or whatever else to speak to him. To go to him and wake him up and watch his eyes flutter and his pupils shrink in the light like a lens shifting outwards and to say, I need you, I need your brain. 

He added another line to his notes knowing even as he wrote it that it probably wasn’t true: 

_Possible this is all wishful bullshit on account of Events._

\--

When he woke up the next evening Remus was at the kitchen table finishing a bastardized stir fry he’d made for himself whilst carefully tuning the radio with Sirius’s wand. By the clock they’d set beside the hotplate it was just after eight PM. “I was going to listen to Amelia Nguyen’s show,” Remus said, “if you want to join me.” 

Customarily they killed time in silence or listened to a record until Remus went to bed and Sirius went out to work at the henge until dawn. He reminded himself this was bigger than whatever it was between the two of them. Wartime meant putting your personal heartaches on the back burner; he remembered this, and he had been quite expert with it, at one time. “Yes,” he said, “sure,” and Remus looked down to hide his surprised expression. 

Sirius poured them each teacups of scotch and found some strawberries in the icebox and rinsed them in the sink, and he sat across from Remus at the table (Remus had left him the good chair) and listened to the filtering of the static until at last the radio tuned crisply and clearly to something that sounded promising — 

“ — connects to this notion of good magic and bad magic which goes back, eternity basically, to the dawn of human history; medicine men, spiritual leaders, spiritual healers, the work they could do, usually in this sort of community context, versus witches, who use their power only to commit harm, and chief among those offenses — ” 

“ — right, animal transformation, as we’ve touched on; and you know that reminds me, Laurent, I wanted to talk about the very bones of this, the very beginning, because I know you and other scholars have traced the lycanthropic condition into atavistic prehistory.” This voice was female, American, with a hint of a well-disguised lisp, and she went on: “But first, this is Interview with the Vampire on 88.6FM, I’m your host Amelia Nguyen, and we are transmitting from everywhere, from your backyards and from your basements, from your fields at night, from your workplaces and from your schools, from Transylvania and Ghawdex, from Volhynia and the Arabian Sea — ”

“Why the Arabian Sea?” Sirius asked, shattering the mystique. 

Remus looked up; it took him a moment to realize he was being addressed. “Merfolk generally place their origin to the West coast of India.” 

“ — we are everywhere, we are legion, and tonight we are joined by Laurent Kateb, adjunct professor of magical history at the Wizarding University of North Africa in Mostaganem, Algeria… whose new book, _Lycanthropic Prehistory of the Mahgreb_ , is out today on the St. Andrews’ University Press… welcome, again, Laurent, for our new listeners…” 

Sirius had read a paper by Kateb, who was regarded as one of the preeminent scholars on part-human prehistoric theory and who was possibly the only currently active werewolf academic in the international magical community. The paper had been about Kateb’s reconciling his lycanthropy with his Muslim faith through historical inquiry and had been titled something memorable like _Keeping Halal as a Ravenous Monster_. “My pleasure to be here, Amelia.” 

“Shall we dive back in, then, ancient history, I was asking you about…” 

“Yes, right, well, if we want to rewind it back to the very beginning, Ghawdex has been populated since 5000 BC; there are cave settlements, megalithic temples, potsherds, all of it dating back seven thousand years, and it is relatively certain vis a vis spell history and runic inscriptions that it was the birthplace of lycanthropy but it’s difficult to prove and it’s difficult to know exactly how so. And, unfortunately, it’s very difficult to get a permit to study there as a werewolf due to the Maltese Ministry’s visa laws, because they fear repopulation by nationalist werewolves. The first traces in Britain are from Scotland, near Fort William, around 3800 BC; more potsherds, inscribed with runes, general emancipation rituality being as Ben Nevis is — ”

There were, Sirius thought, positively no coincidences. “Right,” Amelia said, “the tallest point in the UK.” 

“In North Africa it’s a bit more recent; we have lycanthropic evidence from around 4200 BC, likely on account of the geographic adjacency. In the Americas there’s abundant indigenous mythology; my favorite is the Haitian je-rouge, the werewolf spirit that asks half-asleep mothers to possess their children, which possibly of the Muggle variants is the closest connection to the wizarding conception of the werewolf eagerly seeking to transmit his condition especially to the young.” 

“Something I often think about is how most wizards associate Ghawdex, even just the word or the name, with the STD, not necessarily with the island as an entity or as a historical location of importance.” 

Don’t, Sirius willed himself, do not look up at Remus, but he almost did, just a glance up from under his brow; Remus's elbow rested on the table, and he held his palm over his mouth so Sirius could not read his expression. 

“Right, and that nomenclature is being called into question in the medical community because werewolf groups have petitioned. But it’s another reminder that wizards think about and use us as suits them. In their understanding we exist as a means to an end. A device to move the plot, as it were.” 

“Do you think this is — I guess keeping to our prehistoric theme, do you think wizard bigotry and prejudice against part-humans has been around since the dawn of time?” 

“It’s harder for us to look at that in prehistory, though there is evidence of interplay, trade and teamwork, et cetera, but certainly part-humans have faced prejudice from wizards since the days of the Statute of Secrecy, which of course was basically adopted for wizardkind’s own protection from Christianization, witch hunting, et cetera,” Kateb explained. “The Statute of Secrecy succeeded in part because the community it established for protection was very small and insular. Of all intelligent living things that can perform magic and thus were in danger during the Middle Ages the Statute protected only humans. So around this point we do have part-human extinctions or at least extinctions of these species on the European continent, including the famous race of winged men. Similarly of course to how it happened much later as a result of pretty much all missionary colonialism. The success of the Statute for wizards was that it changed the scapegoat from all performers of magic onto part-human populations which were ostracized and vulnerable and, key element, visibly different in a way most wizards were not, and many of whom struck back on wizarding communities in vengeance… creating more internalized prejudice and fear which has lasted until the present day.” 

“I was going to say, sounds familiar.” 

“History repeat itself extremely reliably especially if people don’t learn from it which evidently none of us have.” 

“Hear hear,” said Amelia. “Shall we take a few callers?” Kateb cracked his knuckles and there was laughter in the booth. “Alright,” she said, “caller number one…” 

“Hello, Amelia,” rasped a voice, bitter and scratchy over airwaves and the phone line, and Sirius thought he knew who it was even before he heard sharply in the still room Remus’s deep, shocked inhale, shaky breath out; they regarded across the table for a split second before Remus pressed the heels of his hands deep into his eyes. He had never heard the voice before and he had only seen the face in MLE sketches half-formed and distant like a sort of Patterson-Gimlin film, gestural and part-dreamed hallucinogenic history, and now it all seemed very clear, pulled together by a spiritus mundi of blood… 

“Oh,” Amelia said; her voice had lost its excited luster. “It’s you again. I didn’t recognize the phone number.” 

“My question this time is for Dr. Kateb,” said Fenrir Greyback. “I admire your work, and I’m looking forward to this latest book, but I’ve always wanted to ask you — despite your frankness about wizarding prejudice against werewolves and other part-human contingents — and same goes for you, Miss Nguyen, as a graduate of that infernal school, and a survivor of their programs — why do you both, in your work, so rarely address the elephant in the room, by which I mean our shared destiny to seize sovereignty from wizards?” 

Kateb attempted mediation. “Well — ”

“I’m not finished,” Greyback continued. “I have done my research and I have done also my fair share of living in this world, by which I mean prison terms, botched assassination attempts, once I even was staked, in Murmansk, where I suppose they so rarely see werewolves they thought all part-humans would succumb to the same methodology… we are stronger than wizards and more resilient — we have been forced to become resilient. Is it any wonder the only known living creature ever to have escaped the British wizarding prison at Azkaban is a werewolf, and one of mine, I will take credit where credit is due — ”

Remus slammed a fist upon the table such that it rattled both teacups of scotch. His jaw was clenched so tightly it must’ve hurt. His eyes were unfocused and red from his pressing and he shifted his free hand to cover his mouth again. 

_One of mine._

“Amelia, I won’t get into the horrific genocide your folk survived…” 

“Please don’t,” she said, voice tight. 

“My point is, clearly we are stronger than them after all we have lived through. If Dark magic’s general argument is that wizards are superior to the Muggle race and as such are fated to be its arbiters then we are certainly superior to the wizarding race and as such we are fated to rule it… we are like, the cockroaches left behind after nuclear warfare, and I don’t think I need to remind you, Amelia, about the contingent of vampires in Pripyat who did indeed survive the Chernobyl disaster…” 

“All I want,” Kateb said, raising his voice, “All I want is to survive. To maintain the autonomy of my body and my history. To have every right to equal treatment — to be treated like any other wizard, with respect and regard to who I am.” 

“If I may borrow some terminology Kateb that would make you a blood tra— ” 

Amelia hung up so quickly she had to fade out the dialtone. The silence in the booth was the silence in the whole world except for the sound Remus made in his throat behind his hand, like the bare remnant of a scream or a curse swallowed, choked back, half-digested. Then Kateb said, “That’s one of your buzzwords.” 

“Yes,” Amelia said, “one of many phrases I don’t tolerate on this show. He’s a frequent caller — and certainly one of my more radical listeners…” 

“Clearly.” 

“Worth talking about, perhaps, if we can segue, many part-humans even those of far less extreme persuasions than our caller cannot in good faith align themselves with the Ministry after recent revelations and so quite a few have entertained allegiance to He Who Must Not Be Named… it really makes me wonder, where do you think is the historical precedent for part-human contingents aligning with Dark wizards?” 

This conversation was certainly relevant to the issue at hand but Sirius was not listening and instead he was watching Remus, who was gathering his breath and his composure slowly. He did not remember the last time he had seen Remus so angry; he took great pains to hide it when he was, and he never seemed angry for himself. After the Event, fifth year, Remus’s disappointment, cold and bitter as stale coffee, had been worse than any screaming match or any fistfight Sirius had ever been in. _What happened_ , he thought, pleading, he almost said; he swallowed it. 

When Remus at last looked up, eyes red, face flushed, the silence between them was rotten, nauseous sweet, beset by flies. 

On the radio: “ — power of blood, or perceived belonging, ownership, we see two trends, one is these — mostly propaganda, I will say — these legendary master packs, or master bands, commanded by this sort of father figure who is a servant of a Dark wizard, a sort of intermediary or crossover, and the second is the construction of ritual emancipation sites — ”

Everything could not continue to be shoved inside. There was no more room. He got up before he snapped and went outside, closing the door louder than he’d intended, and inside he heard the teacups on the table rattle again, and the voices from the radio. As he walked away from the cottage the static and the whispers were drowned out bit by bit by the sea, the sea, the sea. From the henge he watched the cottage until the light in the kitchen and then in the bedroom extinguished. 

Inside at the kitchen table he lit only the tip of his wand and wrote a quick letter to Riley asking for more information about her resonant artifact: _Have you heard anything about ritual emancipation sites in lycanthropic tradition? I understand you can’t share much… but I think that might be what I’ve stumbled across and I have absolutely no frame of reference… even, if you want to recommend me whatever books you’re looking at, I’d heartily appreciate it… talk soon._

Then he wrote a second letter to Harry — 

_Things are probably absolutely fucking wild for you with the tournament but I thought I’d check in and see how you’re doing and ask if you have the time to do a favor for me. There should be a few two-way mirrors at Hogwarts that were installed around 1987-88 whose other side is a special school for part-human students on the Scottish isle of Coll. I have no idea where they are… and I can’t believe I never tried to look for them while I was teaching there. But I’m trying to figure something out and it might be useful. If you have time and feel up for a stupid adventure, could you check it out for me? Otherwise / even if not let me know how you’re doing, missing you all._

He sent his owl off with both and then he paced around the henge for as long as it took him to smoke three cigarettes. At last he sat in the waning moonlight and set up his quill and parchment and dove back in, as into some alien sea. 


	6. Chapter 6

All night Remus watched Sirius at the henge lit gently in the science-fiction light of the bluebell flames he had summoned for warmth. In the spell history trance his eyes were gently closed. Memory like a wringing of his heart and gut and lungs. More than once he rose from bed possessed by nausea and went out back and bent double bracing his hands against the wind-beaten exterior wall yet failed to vomit. Alone in the big bed he tried to close his eyes but could not. The voice rattled his bones. 

He thought of Sirius — the ineluctable mantra. _He thought of Sirius_. Sirius who had taken up nocturnal hours to avoid so much as sleeping on the distant faultline edge of the same bed. Secrecy was contagious, silence was; he knew this. Perhaps it was just what had been done to his memory but he did not think he remembered Sirius ever before having slammed the door. Long ago, in the bed they shared, sometimes he held Sirius at night, the eyes moving beneath the lids, trance of sleep, and the delicate ridge of his eyelashes; sometimes he had been crying, and they were clumped together like a black fan, like the soft inside flesh of a mushroom. He looked inside Sirius’s forearms and traced the veins and breathed in behind his ear and at the nape of his neck and outside he watched the darkness. The heartbeat inside his own chest like a miraculous transplant — orchestral doubling of sound. Every beat like a sledgehammer to the resolve with which he had steeled himself. It must be more, he thought, because Sirius made him breakfast, and rubbed his back and brought fancy chocolate and did laundry without being asked, and kissed him in the morning when he knew his breath was horrible, and held him while he turned into a monster; Sirius spent half an hour on foreplay everytime they had sex and was fond of kissing the insides of his knees; he must love me, he thought, it must be more than a means to an end. 

He remembered — absolute fucking idiot, he was thinking — Sirius inside him, his weight, his heat, his sweat, Sirius’s lips teeth tongue against each of his old wounds; it was summer afternoon in the Chalk Farm flat and the light came in just so upon the bed and the blankets they had shoved back off the bare mattress in the heat and above them the ceiling fan rotated lazily and it stirred the threads of Sirius’s hair and cooled the sweat on the back of Remus’s neck. How they moved together in those days like an orchestration of machinery so well-oiled as to be silent but for their breath. Sirius’s mouth was open at his earlobe and his breath was hot and sweet, and one of his hands covered Remus’s where he had propped himself up against the headboard, and the other was at his hip, his belly, feeling everything inside him tightening, winding like a spool of thread, close to his cock but not close enough, but Remus would not beg, or at least he wouldn’t with his voice. Sirius took care with his body that was sometimes unexpected but at the same time he had seen Remus as a ravening hellbeast and understood he was not fragile. Their fucking at its best felt like a purging of demons, like his head emptied out at least momentarily of all the fear and anxiety and uncertainty that came with lycanthropy and wartime and he was just his body which was filled and covered but not possessed by another body. Sometimes they had music on, and Sirius fucked him to the heartbeat pulse of it, and the world entire distilled to a single feeling, a single elemental reaction, push and pull, equal and opposite, and the music was the sound of his breath and his heartbeat and Sirius’s breath and his heartbeat, the sound of his mind and Remus’s mind, the sound of his body and Remus’s body, and at last when it was only gold he came. 

It wouldn’t be the same if it happened again if it happened at all, because he wasn’t sure his cock worked anymore, and of course because of what he had done. And yet Sirius did not yet know the complete truth of it, if he had only read the trial transcript. I’ll have to tell him, Remus thought; certainly any reaction he might have could not be worse than this, and he imagined about fifteen seconds of the revelation before he went outside to try to puke again. 

He did not know what time it was by the time his heart slowed. When it did he sat up and in the moonlight through the window he found parchment and wrote a letter. 

_Amelia, hello, I am a fan of your show. I am not sure if you are interested in having me on the air but I would like to come and talk if you are amenable. Besides the obvious I was a liaison for Albus Dumbledore with several part human bands across Europe during the war with Voldemort (1978-81) and I wrote what I think remains the most in-depth werewolf legend oral history of the UK when I was at Hogwarts._

_I can Floo or Portkey to your location (not up for Apparition yet). A guarantee of security would be nice as things are a little up in the air for me but — I guess just let me know what you can do._

_Yours sincerely, Remus J Lupin_

He folded the letter tightly and hid it in the ankle cuff of his trousers. To send it he would have to intercept Sirius’s owl, which he had sent off with two rolls of parchment not long after storming out of the cottage and slamming the door. Disappointingly he had grown accustomed to this breed of conniving in the early ‘80s. 

\--

Remus woke from shuffled half-dreaming just after seven, mouth dry, head aching; Sirius had fallen asleep at the kitchen table, and Remus woke him with a hand on his shoulder. He looked sweet, waking up, and very young, and his hair was a mess and his hands were stained with ink, and he smiled at Remus and Remus smiled back and opened his mouth to offer a cup of tea but then Sirius went through the Disillusioned veil and into the bedroom with a roaring and no-doubt conversation-ending yawn. 

Remus brought his tea outside with him and a bit of toast and his book in the middle of which he had closed up the letter to Amelia and the notes he had been taking in case his memory became again untrustworthy. The breeze was cool and tasted like salt and green and the way the sea moved almost restlessly against the rocks he could tell later in the night a storm would come. Across the channel on Mainland he could see the sheep pale as eraser marks against the hills. Just out of sight along the Southern shore was the iron age village at Gurness which Sirius had told him about, had shown him photographs from a Muggle book, _Prehistoric Sites of Orkney_ , which a previous tenant had left in the cupboards. 

“I’ve been studying,” Sirius had said, the night of their arrival, “I’ve written four books. I’m a scholar of magical theory.” 

He said it like a sort of sheepish confession and indeed his cheeks were pink and he only dared to meet Remus’s eye a split second. The first time they had eaten dinner together in thirteen years and Remus couldn’t touch it, though Sirius had heated up some of the food the house elves had packed from the Hogwarts kitchens, and he was so hungry and it smelled like every good memory he could call up from their school days, but nothing tasted right. “What books,” Remus had asked him. 

Then they lay together in the bed, and it was dark and he could hear Sirius breathing ponderously, feigning sleep, and he could not yet really fathom that this all was real, and in case it was a lucid dream he thought, vividly, _hold me_. 

He had never liked being held; the animal piece of him, the primal thing, panicked when it woke and couldn’t move. But perhaps that was another thing about him that had changed without his noticing. 

_Hold me_ , he thought, desperately now, _hold me, hold me_ , but Sirius couldn’t hear him, because the world was real, and he fell asleep anyway, and he hadn’t really woken up, or at least not all the way, for two months. He supposed in the hibernation he had only succeeded at putting off the inevitable.

Around midday he heard the island birds’ warning call and searched the sky until he could see to the South the telltale wobbly speck of Sirius’s owl, accompanied this time by another. He had taken a few Owl Treats from the bag Sirius kept hidden in the cupboard to make sure this would work — if you wanted to read someone else’s mail, you had to do it while their owl was distracted, as he had learned early in his days working for the Order, and if you wanted to send a letter with someone else’s owl, you had to get it to like you, which usually could be done with food. 

They must’ve smelled the treats because he didn’t have to go chasing them off across the tarn. One was Sirius’s nondescript brown, very much an academic’s owl, sturdy and smart-looking and suspicious, and the other was a big and somewhat ostentatious grey, strong and proud, indispensable for long flights. Sirius’s had two letters tied to its spindly leg and the big grey just one; he sent her home first, empty-handed, before he swapped out the two letters for his own and stuck a treat in Sirius’s owl’s beak. “D’you think you could find Amelia Nguyen? The American vampire with the radio show?” 

He had to give the owl two more treats (its beak was stuck together) before it eyed him with somewhat less reproach and took off, following the big grey. Then he sat again in the cool grass and, with only moderate guilt, opened the three rolls of parchment. If Sirius would not speak to him there was only one way. Otherwise it was not much different — this island had become the prison, and he had become his own torturer, and the world outside was indistinct in haze, and he would wonder if it even existed but for the evidence he seized snatches of only when he was allowed. 

The first letter was signed only _RMS_ — 

_It’s not my purview (I’d read Laurent Kateb’s “Beastly Resonances” on the subject [think it was in the Yale Review of Magical Theory]) but apparently there are resonant sites and artifacts throughout the world associated with lycanthropic ritual emancipation clearly understudied due to abiding prejudices. You know the Burke-Restall Theory that resonance arises through repeated ritual yes? I have always loved this notion that it is/was possible for us to will magic into being. But like I said in my last letter it’s a bit chicken or egg. With regard to LRE where certain rituals must be performed at certain locations it does have some bearing… Anyway you don’t hear much about LRE happening presently though I suppose technically it is still possible / as possible as it ever could be, I mean, I think it is mostly symbolic as a process? It would be like emancipating yourself from your parents — like, you wouldn’t have to live with them anymore or whatever but you would still have their blood? Or at least, I think so, as a human, looking at this all removedly, studying these artifacts as a first year grad student because they are allegedly too unimportant for those with doctorates._

_Can’t you ask Lupin about all this? I’m assuming you are with him? He wrote about LRE in his seventh year project of which you may remember I am a huge fan particularly his feminist perspective on the subject (!!)_

_My best to you — Taylor invited me to Lampedusa over Christmas as her family will be in Greece this time… will send pictures if I can. She is interning at the Ministry and I hardly ever see her anymore so I think this will be special — but I am a bit nervous… Talk soon._

The second letter — 

_Black — I thought something was up when I was there. Wow! Let me know if I can come back out sometime… would love to do some digging…_

_Lupin knows the legend and I’m sure he would tell you. It means a lot to those of us who have less than glowing memories of the night of our changing / infection / what have you therefore I have always assumed it means a lot to those of us who were bitten by Greyback. It’s hard to trace werewolf legend / oral history as so much of it is influenced and/or reactionary but I’ve heard the legend around the world and it seems generational. Usually passed down between women — which is another element perhaps relevant to you now, it’s thought that female werewolves have historically spearheaded most lycanthropic magic ritual including ritual emancipation. The legend also pinpoints the three sites of ritual performance: the highest point in one’s nation, the lowest, and the place where one was bitten. I guess therein lies my only reservation about your findings… what are you thinking?_

_Keep me posted — and tell Lupin hello from me — Indra_

Why would Sirius ask two different academics about ritual emancipation? As he recalled from his own research it wasn’t much in vogue anymore among werewolf communities; after all, he had only heard it from Indra in his solicitation of half the werewolf population of Britain. And Sirius had read his paper; he must’ve known Remus knew the legend, but he had asked Indra for it instead. _I thought something was up when I was there_ , Indra had written. Testing the theory, Remus reached into the earth for the resonance and felt it same as ever, soft and almost coaxing, filling his hands, filling the cracks, gold as kintsugi. Yet perhaps there was something about this place, he reasoned; after all, there were no coincidences, not when one’s every movement was prescribed by Albus Dumbledore. 

If something about this place had to do with the spell for becoming one’s own master and Sirius had not told him about it — 

He pushed it down into the faulty trapdoor in his mind and read the third letter. 

_Sirius, I have seen those mirrors before but always thought it was a sort of a fluke, or something more metaphysical like the Mirror of Erised. Both of the ones I’ve seen are in empty classrooms on the sixth floor and they’re covered with black dropcloths. One reflects a classroom that’s caved in. You can see it change by seasons, like sometimes there’s snow on the ground, etc., or grass and moss growing inside. The other one must be their Great Hall; it’s empty more often than not but a few times we’ve seen students in there though not many. Once Hermione and Ron and I took a peek and a few of them noticed us. We were a bit jarred and so were they and since then I haven’t looked. I remember it’s a big grey concrete room with tile and low ceilings which drip, there are a few ragged hangings, like our house banners, and a couple of the windows are broken and replaced with plywood boards, and I suppose when I looked in they were having dinner but it didn’t look like real food. Tell you the truth it freaked me out and I almost told Dumbledore about it. You said it’s a school for part-humans? Ron said he thought it was a detention facility for juvenile offenders…_

_The other thing I should tell you is, and I swear I don’t know how this happened, because technically it’s not possible, and I’m not eligible, but I’m competing in the Triwizard Tournament… I’m the fourth contestant. I just found out tonight. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. The other students are seventeen and geniuses and one of them is a Veela —_

Remus stopped reading. When he rolled the parchment again his hands were shaking. 

There were two way mirrors from the Coll School to Hogwarts and Sirius knew about them and he had asked Harry to look. Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived, who Remus had last seen age fifteen months standing up in his crib reaching for his mother’s body, who was somehow — impossibly — competing in a tournament that had not been held for centuries because of all the deaths and all the Dark sideline affairs, alongside a part-human contestant, the first of her kind allowed through the Hogwarts gates in decades. It would quite simply not have been allowed were it not a means to an end. 

He remembered Kateb on Amelia’s show — protection initiatives for wizardkind in times of strife succeeded when the community they established for defense was very small. They had lost one scapegoat in the form of Remus; now they were looking to create another. Here was a Veela, this time, a woman, in a scenario altogether just different enough. 

The options were assimilation at any cost or alignment with Voldemort. As though there had really ever been any other options. 

He stood up; his knees cracked. He would have to talk to Sirius about it; it was inevitable and it seemed the inevitability had rolled around to now, this day, with the wind, and the storm coming. Certainly Dumbledore had put them here to kill each other one way or the other but they could not afford to let a single other domino fall. He went in the house and shut the door quietly and sat at the table and read the letters again and then a third time and he wondered if he was seeing patterns that weren’t there and if perhaps he had well and truly lost it. Perhaps this was what Muggle therapists called a persecution complex. Or perhaps he was jealous, like he had pulled Sirius away from his job and his life and perhaps, God, a lover he had left somewhere, and still it wasn’t enough. He expected forgiveness but he had not given it. And he had not been exactly clear with Sirius about what he wanted forgiveness for. 

Sooner or later it was going to boil over and perhaps if it happened sooner rather than later some of it at least could be salvaged. “Sirius,” he called. He smoothed the letters out upon the table. Then again: “Sirius?” 

At last he rose and knocked with the heel of his hand against the empty doorframe. “I’m coming,” said Sirius from the Disillusioned room beyond, and he sounded exhausted but Remus could not tell if he had woken up from sleep. Something like a big black snake curled up in his stomach; against it he crossed his arms tightly across his chest. Footsteps against the cold floor — then, close behind him at the table, Sirius’s voice in not-quite-surprise: “You’ve been reading my mail?” 

“Yes, well. If you won’t talk to me I don’t know how else.” Sirius leaned over the table to skim the letters. “There wasn’t anything — sensitive or salacious.” 

“Harry’s in the — ” 

“Yes; look who he’s competing against.” 

“Remus,” Sirius said, standing straight, “can we not, maybe not right now, dig into this when my fourteen year old godson has been consigned to _compete_ in one of the most dangerous magic competitions known to wizardkind?” 

“We have to dig into it, we have to do it now because it’s all the same, it’s all — ” 

“I believe you, okay, I really do, but — ” 

“Clearly you don’t,” he said; he could feel the stretched-tight rubber-band of his patience snapping, he could feel his voice getting louder, and his heartbeat in his ears, and the wind at the door, “clearly you don’t, how can you say you believe me, how can you say you ever believed me? When you haven’t done shit, Sirius, not shit, for thirteen years, thirteen years while I — and these children —” 

“I tried,” Sirius said through clenched teeth; he was trying very hard to hold himself still, his hands, his eyes and shoulders, as he had been trained — as he had practiced, in the days of the war. “I tried; Pomona and I spearheaded the motion to integrate Hogwarts — ” 

“Fantastic, thank you, in 1987, and then you sat back and ate bonbons and grieved abstractly while I rotted, and they all rotted, while they poisoned us, do you get it? While they fed us — slime and poison and shit, shit, shit, shit, always, no matter how good I ever tried to be, for them, for any of it. For you.” 

It felt almost brokenly good to say it, at last to say it. To open that box which remained heretofore untouched. Sirius’s eyes were like chips of stone, or hot black coals limned with grey bone ash, and they squared off around each other, almost the way they did as animals, and with eyes for the doors, and he thought, desperately, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he wanted a real fistfight, an honest-to-god teeth-chipping strangling fistfight; a cold thrill passed down through his spine like ice or rainwater at the thought of it. He was unaccustomed to and horrified-exhilarated by the urge to tear in his human teeth. Like a weight held back behind them different than the weight of hunger or the weight of screaming, different than their cyclical lunar sharpening. 

He had opened his mouth to say something else but Sirius beat him to it. “You tried to be — while you suspected I was betraying you to Voldemort? Enough to — to encourage James and Lily to change their secret keeper?” Sirius tore his eyes away, and he swallowed, clenching his jaw. “I’ve been thinking, everything you set up because you didn’t trust me, and I still can’t fucking tell exactly what I did, and so I’m thinking, maybe it has something to do with something fucking else.” 

“Maybe,” said Remus, it tasted like bile, or like raw meat, “maybe then it fucking does.” 

“Maybe it also has to do with the same fucking thing why I didn’t — why I bought it. Because rest assured it was fucking hard. Rest assured I lost a lot of fucking sleep over it Remus over why you would do it after everything and rest assured I did not go quietly because I thought I knew your entire fucking soul.” 

He almost said, you did, you did, and you still do, before he remembered in fact Sirius had not. He at first thought the static he could suddenly feel was all his blood rushing to or draining from his face and hands before he realized — it was the same ghostly punch of magic from the night of Sirius’s nightmare. Serpentine and alive in the room and touching him. Buzzing, insectoid, warm but not friendly. Uncanny alien. Something in him responded in kind, twisting and yearning and pulling tight; he recalled the memory that had saved him from drowning in the North Sea, the single psychedelic occasion he had felt resonance between them. 

“Your entire fucking soul,” Sirius went on; when he got angry, and Remus remembered this, the Black to his blood reared its dragonish reptilian head like some slighted and secretive loch monster: almost shyly, nevertheless heart-stopping, not unbelonging. “I thought I knew — even the darkest piece but I did not. And even then it took a lot of his convincing before I really believed it — that there was even, like, the tiniest shred of you, that I didn’t know.” 

“Whose convincing.” 

“Whosoever’s do you fucking think.” 

“I keep telling you Sirius you can’t trust — ” 

“I told you, I fucking didn’t, not at first.” 

“Then.” He didn’t want to hear it but he thought he probably deserved to. “What convinced you?” 

“You tell me first what fucking convinced you it was me.” 

_The Black thing in your blood. Your absences, your secrecy. The black thing — the animal thing — in my blood._ The latter first of all, encompassing the rest, how difficult he knew he must have been to love. 

“Probably the same,” he said, “probably the fucking same.” 

“I need to, Remus, for God’s sake, I need to hear you say it.” 

It should not be so hard to say it for all he had spent years thinking it and not much other than it on the worst days, the worst months, the worst years, but it didn't fit in his mouth in human language, and the words were too long and sharp. Sirius looked almost horribly and regretfully victorious and Remus hated and loved him desperately and the side of him they had always wanted at the Auror office for interrogations and the needling way he had about him; he did know Remus's whole entire soul, he knew every inch of it, because Remus had told him, had gutted had flayed himself willfully alive, for him, starting at the gut when they were eleven years old. “He told me,” he said at last, translating from his own ancient mental categorization, unlanguage of horror sung in unrelenting decree, “Greyback told me, in France, in ’78.” 

Sirius exhaled heavily and turned toward the far window. Their eyes were like opposing ends of magnets. 

“He said, the spy among my old friends and Bellatrix were like blackbirds of a feather. Black birds. So Peter must’ve told him — ”

“But you believed him.” 

“I tried not to.” 

“But you did.” 

This thing was so heavy, it was the heaviest thing he had ever carried, because it buoyed every other heavy thing in itself. It was the bodily representation of his single value as discerned by the wizarding world at large: he was a werewolf bidden to serve his master. It was with him from the day on the moor he remembered in bloody flashes, ’65, and he was lying on the table in his parents’ kitchen, and his father was in the corner crying, red-faced drunk, and his mother was shouting something he couldn’t understand, pressing a dishtowel against his side and a second at the join of his neck and shoulder, and his eyes felt sticky and his blood very hot and in the back of his mind still searing were the golden eyes and the yellow teeth and the way the creature had stretched out of the moon… his ears were ringing, and his mother saw his eyes open and she bent keeping pressure to his wounds and pressed her rouged lips against his forehead where they felt almost cool and in the corner the sound his father made was like a sob or a scream ripped out of him, and Remus remembered guiltily, they had been getting ready to go to Shakespeare in the Park ( _Titus Andronicus_ ) in Yeovil… It was with him then and it was with him in school and it was with him in Chalk Farm when he felt he was so in love it might’ve killed him and it was with him of course in Brittany and in the years after. And then it was with him on the train to Fraserburgh and on the cigarette boat to the prison when they had chained his wrists to his ankles with silver manacles and he felt sick with madness already like its own transformative possessor; they had wands held to him and even two Muggle guns and they had shown him that the bullets in the chamber were also silver. 

“Yes,” he said, “I did.” 

Sirius turned to him; his eyes were wet, there was so little sound when he said, “Why?” 

“I knew you had a dark piece to you Sirius and you’d used it before. You made me a means to an end for your purposes before.” 

“Stop,” Sirius said, “stop there.” 

“You asked me to — ”

“I know what I — ”

“It’s — it shook me out, okay, is what it did, it fucked me up, you saw. It turned — we were kids. It turned us inside out. That was the beginning of it, for me. I didn’t trust, after that, anything was real, my memory… and Dumbledore, that was around when — he came to see me in the hospital, and he saw I had ordered all these, all these tests, and he — like it was par for the course. Another fucking day at the office.” 

Sirius leaned back against the table. “Tests,” he said. 

“Yes, God, I know you read the trial transcript — ” 

“Yes, but, what tests.” 

“Sirius — ”

“Can you, please, just tell me…” 

“Every — God.” Something spilled salt into his mouth. “Every fucking STD in the book I had them run. Muggle and otherwise. Because I didn’t — it couldn’t’ve been. I could feel, like I could tell, there was something — ”

“And — ”

“It all came up clean is what I’m trying to tell you and I didn’t believe it so I had them run it again and I still didn’t believe it so I went… I made them bring me in a wheelchair to the fucking lab, so I could watch, that it was really my blood.” 

Sirius pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. The magic feeling so diffuse through the room he felt it stinging in his throat when he breathed — and he found himself toeing the edge of that broken certainty — 

“Sirius, I — this was mine, my whole price, the way you all paid yours, and I didn’t — I thought I was doing it to save your life, to save all our lives, and the old man told me, he said, information at any cost — ” 

“It came up — ”

“All of it.” His voice not a voice. Hardly a voice. “All of it came up clean, I swear; you could’ve checked, at St. Mungo’s.” 

Silence thick as — thicker than butter. All of this was poison shared. Poison spoonfed from the same bottle in service of the same narrative — a tapestry woven of threads. The images from the dream he had shared with Greyback, over a year previous — test tubes, vials, intravenous wiring, transfusions. Somewhere the seeds of it had necessitated planting. “Sirius,” he tried; his voice shook with tears. “Padfoot, which is it?” 

Sirius took his hands from his eyes and crossed his arms. “Ghawdex,” he said. “Lycanthropic neurosyphilis.” 

Of course it had been the most painfully obvious. The one associated by its very name with the very bones of him. “I don’t — that was the first one. I don’t have it.” 

“Right,” said Sirius, voice fragile, “yes.” 

Remus reached for his wrist but Sirius flinched away. Inside him the floor dropped out. Gingerly as if wounded Sirius stood and looked at him, wild, part feral, magic loose, a hundred thousand tiny static shocks, and inside his mind a chorus of screaming, _don't leave, don’t leave, don’t leave, don’t leave me…_

“I need,” Sirius started, “I need — ”

He turned into nothingness. The air snapped like plywood shattering and he was gone. With him went the magic feeling, and the last of the sound. 

In the painterly stillness for a moment Remus waited unmoving for Sirius to come back; he had left his wand on the table, and his coat hung behind the door, and wherever he had gone he had gone in slippers. At last Remus exhaled all his stale breath and inhaled again but his whole inside felt scorched ragged, and there was something thick caught in his throat he didn’t like. His vision was a wet blur. He did not remember the last time he had cried. 

The complete actuality he could not yet fathom. It was like the night in Azkaban he had hallucinated he had killed Sirius and Harry. The truth was too big — it was bigger even than he had first imagined — for a mind like his. Chewed full of holes by moths and rot and vermin. Everywhere it bled out. At last he sat at the table and wept. Everything pressing over like a black shroud. What if, he wondered, in there, he had caught one of those creatures, like a cold or a fever, and it lived inside his mind and now it gorged itself? 

He lost track of time but when he got up it had started raining outside and the wind shook the grass and whistled in the bones of the old church and about the henge. He watched it for a while standing on the threshold listening absently to the ceiling dripping yet unable to muster the will to do anything about it. If he had wanted to he thought he could have gone to the circle and ripped every stone from the ground. Yet he remembered in the black days in London it had always helped him to put a record on. 

There was no turntable and besides even if there was his hands were probably shaking too hard to line up the needle. But there was a spell he remembered, and Sirius had left his wand on the table. He kept the vinyl in a crate beside his books; there were only a few LPs. They used to have a shelf they shared they kept magicking deeper. For the first time he wondered what Sirius had done with his vinyl — with his mother’s Patsy Cline records. His father’s miraculously procured test pressing of _Hunky Dory_. Perhaps he had sold it all. 

There were a few records he didn’t recognize and for a while he stared at the scarred-looking bloody cover of an LP called _Slanted and Enchanted_. Then he found Iggy Pop’s _Lust for Life_. Sirius had written his initials on the back cover in a ballpoint pen, just after he bought it at a Muggle record shop in London, the day it came out, late August 1977, and Remus had come to the city early to do his school shopping with the scant Galleons he’d made that summer gardening for his neighbors, and Sirius had come down from James’s to collect his things from Grimmauld Place while his parents were out, and Remus had offered to help, but Sirius had refused. In the summer he had laid awake staring at the ceiling. Downstairs his parents argued. His dreams were strange. But the weight was lifted. That was the day he bought Patti Smith’s _Horses_. 

The record in the case like the relic of a martyred saint. Its weight familiar. Moony, said Sirius in the dark, from the past, and the streetlight came in through the broken Venetian blinds, how about you put a record on? He recalled the spell and spoke it — _circumactus_. He had to help the record start spinning with a finger and a desperate reach for the henge’s resonance. Which likely was why it started playing from the final track, “Fall In Love With Me.” 

He shut his eyes. In the flat they were dancing. If they had been left alone there perhaps they would still be dancing. In the golden sticky cocoon of thread — the atavistic heart-meat of the very world. 

When he stood lightning threw a shock of strobe-ish brightness into the room and the spinning record shadow, and thunder followed it. The ceiling dripped cold rainwater down the back of his neck. 

_There’s just a few like you so young and real —_

He grabbed the record out of the spell and shattered it against the table. 

\--

In the strange new dawn of the morning they had come to Eynhallow the portraits in Dumbledore’s office stared. Sirius was unslept and his academic robes were disheveled and dirty and torn here and there, and Remus — wizarding Britain’s most wanted — was wearing a blanket and could hardly stand, and in a gilded birdcage set on one of the headmaster’s chintz armchairs an altogether uncannily old rat squealed and ran circles frantically. Dumbledore had no doubt seen worse (and certainly he had seen worse from Sirius and Remus and Peter when their ranks had also included James) but it seemed the portraits had not. They did not even whisper — they just stared. They stared and stared and Remus watched them feeling his very hold on consciousness waver; he could tell that in the night he must have been throwing himself against the door, because his head ached and his shoulders and he could feel the rising warmth of bruises, and his throat was dry and ragged. The portraits had amazed him when he was young and he knew some of them had other frames in the houses in which Sirius and James had grown up. In the far window (physically impossible, he remembered, due to the castle's architecture) light caught and shimmered in the dissipating fog. The desperate and frightened sounds of the rat in the cage were very loud inside his headache. 

Sirius left to pack his things with a squeeze to Remus’s shoulder which felt like a warm static shock. When he was gone from the room it felt colder, and as the door closed behind him Remus felt surveilled — the trace of summoning watching eyes cold against the back of his neck. Perhaps it was only the portraits. “Do sit down,” said Dumbledore. 

Gingerly he did. He held the blanket tightly around himself; it smelled like ash and dust and very old blood, or perhaps he himself did. He could feel his heart racing in his forearm where it was pressed against his chest. Thirteen years since he had seen this man without the blunt metal door of the cage like a blast shield between them. Since he had sat in a chair. Since anyone had believed him. 

“It appears we were wrong,” said Dumbledore gently. He removed his pince-nez and set about cleaning them with a gilded sleeve. 

“Yes.” 

“I will admit it is rare.” He smiled. “But it is possible.” 

Remus remembered Dumbledore had not answered the question after the fourth trial. He could not be certain if the old man had ever believed he was guilty. But Dumbledore did believe — had always believed, or at least had believed since 1978 — that he was capable of surviving. Above all, and perhaps alone. Like when he had been bitten on the moor in Somerset in ’65 he had been turned in fact into a kind of human fallout shelter. 

“Right,” Remus said. 

“Would you like a bit of chocolate?” 

“No, thank you.” 

“It might warm you up.” 

“I said no thank you.” 

He didn’t want to speak — he couldn’t speak. His throat hurt. 

“Remus,” Dumbledore said, “I am going to do everything in my power to rectify — ”

“Weren’t you going to make us that Portkey?” 

Dumbledore just looked at him with an expression straddling pity and derision. “Remus,” he said again, gently. Like he addressed a dog, or a chained madman. “I’m trying to — ”

“There’s nothing you can do.” 

“I’m trying to make amends.” 

“Well,” Remus said, “you can’t.” 

“I would’ve thought you — ”

“Stop,” he said, “fucking — you can’t guilt me anymore.” 

“I can’t?” 

“I won’t let you,” Remus lied, like to make it true. 

Satisfied with the cleanliness of the pince-nez, Dumbledore put them back on, squinting. His smile was cold and did not reach his eyes. “I suppose,” he said, “I should provide you with some background.” 

He wanted to stick his fingers in his ears and go la la la la la la la like a child so as not to hear it. But instead he listened. He looked up at all the portraits and watched them scatter away like birds when his eyes met theirs as if even painted they risked contagion. There were American Indian legends that lycanthropy and others of what were referred to academically as Transformation Curses were catching through eye contact, he remembered. 

“Sirius is a well-regarded magical theory academic,” Dumbledore said. This was moderately surprising, as Sirius had dropped out of the fifth year class after three sessions. “He finished a book about magical ur-objects started by his deceased uncle, around ’83; it was well-received, so I invited him to come and teach.” 

This translated as: _I needed to keep an eye on this particular asset_. 

“Why did he stop working for the Auror department?” Remus asked. 

“Psychological deferment. An honorable discharge, basically; all the surviving Order members received them. We had — reason for concern, you see, he tried to come to your trial, and the MLE went after him for assaulting an officer.” 

“Assaulting an — ”

“Yes, the son of a rather important Ministry bigwig; Sirius broke his nose. It was all swept under the rug but…” 

“He tried to come.”

“Yes, of course.”

_Of course._

The rat screaming in the cage. 

“The MLE squadron had received orders not to let him in. Or any other potential spectators.” 

Remus’s ears were ringing. “He could have testified — ” 

“He wanted to, as a character witness in your defense. I dissuaded him — for which I now apologize. I didn’t see the effect it could have, against the evidence and the testimony — it would have wounded him — wounded you both. I apologize.” 

As though their wounding had ever dissuaded Dumbledore from anything before. “You wanted to put me — ”

“We all wanted to. Dare I posit that in fact we needed to. Voldemort had no corpse, of course, and you know this, because he is not truly dead. But to communicate victory even of a temporary sort to a terrified public we had to create closure from scratch.” 

“From where — it didn’t exist.” 

“We had to, Remus; some things are larger — ” For once he hesitated. “Larger than one person’s suffering.” 

He bit his lip against — he did not know what he would do if he allowed himself to speak. He watched as Dumbledore retrieved from under his desk a deflated Quaffle and imbued it with the necessary spells to become a Portkey. In the flurry of Latin he heard the name of the island, _Eynhallow_ , like its own ancient hex in the Celtic tradition; he spared a wish it would really take them there — that there was safe. That anywhere was.

“I know you’ve learned quite a bit of patience,” Dumbledore went on, when he had finished the spellwork. “You’ll need to be patient with Sirius.” 

I have not learned patience, Remus did not say; I inherited it along with a thousand other things, and I have been patient with Sirius since September 1971. I am the world’s foremost living expert on Patience with Sirius Black. 

“There’s a rather — intimidating gulf for him between what he knows and the truth as is now apparent.” 

“Yes,” Remus said, “for me as well.” 

Dumbledore’s eyes twinkled but it was a strange unfriendly twinkle like sunlight off an oil slick. “You’ll find his might be rather larger.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean.” 

“You know he read your trial transcript. Much of it that was made public was heavily edited. Many elements were redacted by the Ministry’s Department of Criminal Justice for security reasons. Namely all your statements in your own defense were redacted. And as such when he learned what had happened in France — that was when he gave up pursuing your acquittal.” 

Dread filled his throat, thick and choking, sickly-sweet as rotting flesh, and his mind, like a drape of black cloth. This was another piece of it, he realized; if they destroyed each other, and they were the only two who knew — 

“He has no proof,” Dumbledore went on, “besides this — ” He indicated the rat — “and your word, which he has been convincing himself not to trust for over a decade.” 

You, he thought, poisonously, you, chessmaster… _amends_ , he wanted to say, _what possible amends_ , and he opened his mouth, but Sirius walked in the door, laden down with two duffel bags. The guilt in him rabid like a fever twisted and braided with something else, and Sirius looked at him, and dared a small empathetic smile, which said, _I am every bit as confused as you_. 

He thought he knew everything and nothing at once. When he stood his vision turned black with exhaustion. This, he thought, this is how it is going to be from now on… 

\--

Sirius’s owl returned waterlogged to the cottage just before dusk. The rain had calmed enough that Remus had gone down to the beach wrapped in Sirius’s army-green slicker to sit and listen to the waves, watching the clouds and the fog move across Mainland and the sea. The letter Sirius’s owl carried was from Amelia Nguyen, and it vengefully pecked Remus’s hand so aggressively his knuckles bled as he tried to detach the scroll from its foot: 

_Mr. Lupin, I would love if you would come talk on the show. I actually have been looking for a contact for you because it’s important to me that you have the opportunity to speak for yourself. We frequently have to move the studio for our safety but currently we are occupying an abandoned Muggle college in Wales (on the Bristol Channel between Cardiff and Swansea). Let me know a date that is good for you and I will send a Portkey, or our precise Floo address. Show is Mondays 8-10pm but we can pre-tape if you need. This might be the best way as I cannot guarantee your safety (I wish I could but I can’t guarantee my own) if we do the show live and I’m not sure what sorts of tracking mechanisms the Ministry can employ. Let me know what works for you. I look forward to meeting you — A. Nguyen_

He coaxed Sirius’s owl inside with treats and dried it off with one of the pink beach towels. It was a hilarious sight with its feathers disheveled and fluffy but he couldn’t bring himself to laugh. He read Amelia’s letter again and folded it tightly into the breast pocket of the slicker coat and went outside again this time up the hill to the henge. The rain was coming in a fine and cool sideways mist like walking through fog with one’s eyes closed. He crouched at the heelstone; his knees cracked like disparate gunshots, and he closed his eyes and listened. All he could collect of his scattered consciousness he pressed into the earth. 

_What are you?_

_Why am I here?_

He hardly felt it when the raindrops thickened as did the clouds and the thunder he thought he heard was perhaps only his heartbeat. It was not cold, in the hollow room, at the heart of everything. He listened into his ears ringing silence until echoing in the most liminal of space between himself and itself he thought he heard a spell. 


	7. Chapter 7

The archivist at St. Mungo’s was a black Welshwoman with braids that seemed alive. Behind her desk were rows upon rows of shelves like the stocks at Olivander’s containing seemingly centuries of files coded with colors and tagged enchantments. She took in Sirius, who had conned his way past the guards mostly with magic — his slippers and ragged rumpled jeans and torn t-shirt, and the look in his eye he was sure was rather manic, as though he had come here in fact to check himself into the criminal insanity wing. “What is it,” she said diplomatically, “that you’re looking for, sir?” 

“Someone’s — old medical records.” 

“Those are confidential,” she explained, as if to a toddler. “All medical information is classified, like even if you were an Auror I couldn’t share it with you. Haven’t you ever watched Muggle TV?” 

Hating himself he put as much intent into his voice as he could muster. _This is unforgivable,_ something in him whispered, _literally this is Unforgivable_. “I need to look at — at Remus Lupin’s records from January 1979.” 

She rolled her eyes and then she stood and summoned them. If he’d been in the right frame of mind he would’ve been in awe of the magic she performed to fetch his particular file — her mind a sort of computer or catalog and the dance of spellwork simply an expression of its contents. The file folder, a deep indigo blue, zoomed into her open hand from the distant shadows, and she passed it to Sirius, indicating with her wand hand the empty chairs that lined the walls. “We keep one file on each patient, so it will contain his complete medical records. You can review it over there.” 

He thanked her and sat; the chairs were uncomfortable, but he hardly felt it. 

_WEREWOLF_ , it said, on the very top of Remus’s record, even before his name, or the day he was born. 

_Lupin, Remus John  
_ _DOB March 10 1960  
_ _Date of bite June 22 1965_

With a rising nauseous sense of voyeuristic guilt he skimmed through the record of Remus’s birth to Hope and Lyall and his treatment the night of his bite (including _presumed master werewolf: Fenrir Greyback_ ); he felt filthy to be reading information so intimate, but most of it Remus had told him, long ago, because Sirius had been curious and had asked. Fourth year Spring, perhaps; he thought he remembered. They were doing a project about werewolves in Defense Against the Dark Arts and it was a warm May yet Remus insisted on wearing long sleeves and his cloak with the high collar to every class and not even cuffing his sleeves up against the heat as James and Sirius and Peter did. The Defense professor at the time was an ex-Auror who had worked for the Department in Grindelwald’s day and he wore a lot of silver and always smelled of garlic and would not speak to Remus or look even vaguely in his direction. In the part-human unit the professor went into great detail regarding lycanthropic transmission (Sirius recalled the phrase “ecstasy of surrender”) and Remus broke his quill and excused himself for a new one, but did not return to class. “Moony,” Sirius had asked that night, warily; James and Peter had gone out with the Invisibility Cloak to procure some weed from a Hufflepuff student who was rumored to be growing cannabis in the Forbidden Forest, and they were alone in the dormitory, “what was it — if you remember. What was it really like?” Remus said he remembered the bloody teeth, the bloody snout, its weight, and the way it dragged him, like he was made of nothing. Its rotten and metallic animal stench. The fragile blur of moon. Blood in the soft light black upon the grass. “I didn’t,” he said, but Sirius hadn’t really been able to tell what. “I kept trying to hit it in the nose.” 

Next in the record was the physical exam he had gotten in order to attend Hogwarts. Then the physical exam he had gotten when he had applied (of course, to no avail) to the Auror department. And then the records from the Event: 

_December 29 1978 victim of mauling checked in by Albus Dumbledore 7:13 AM —_

This he skimmed too, because all of this he also already knew. 

_Lesions to face, back, chest, stomach, thigh, shoulder, arms; shattered collarbone, compound fracture to femur; etc. not responsive to healing spells —  
_ _Werewolf blood transfusion performed 10:47 AM —  
_ _Victim stabilized in magical coma 1:38 PM —_

At last: 

_January 7 1979 patient requests full STMM screen  
_ _Ghawdex Syndrome: NEGATIVE  
_ _Aberystwyth Herpes: NEGATIVE  
_ _Renegades: NEGATIVE  
_ _Wizard’s and Muggle Lice: NEGATIVE  
_ _Muggle Syphilis: NEGATIVE  
_ _Muggle Chlamydia: NEGATIVE  
_ _Muggle Herpes: NEGATIVE  
_ _Muggle Gonorrhea: NEGATIVE_

Sirius looked onward. 

_January 9 1979 patient uncertain about results of tests, requests second STMM screen  
_ _Ghawdex Syndrome: NEGATIVE_

And onward —

_January 13 1979 patient requests third STMM screen; brought to lab to witness blood testing. Patient referred to therapist.  
_ _Ghawdex Syndrome: NEGATIVE_

Sirius closed the folder and brought it up to the archivist with a shaky smile he could hardly muster and then he went out into the atrium where witches and wizards — some with humorous conditions that were clearly spell accidents and others certainly more dire — milled about frantically, and then he slipped back out onto the street in desperate search for the freshest air one could come by in the heart of rainy Muggle London. 

Two possibilities: 

  1. Remus was truly not sick and as such Sirius had caught Ghawdex from another source. 
  2. Remus was sick but had been led to believe he was not. 



Whatever the case he had not transmitted it to Sirius out of spite or uncaring or lack of responsibility or because of his obsessive silencing compartmentalization. The first option was certainly most probable as the doctors at St. Mungo’s had tested Remus’s blood before his own eyes and then referred him to a shrink Sirius doubted Remus had ever seen. Yet he hadn’t slept with anyone besides Remus between late 1977 and October 1981, and all his sexual partners before that had been fellow Hogwarts students who were similarly quasi-virginal, and certainly none of them were werewolves.

Somehow it had been given to him to manufacture his belief in Remus’s guilt. The thing that had been curdling in his stomach since their argument in the cottage twisted still tighter. Everything he had said and done not an hour ago in the far North in the same rain played on loop in his mind. But this was a certainty thirteen years coming. 

He walked on without thinking — he was wearing his slippers, which were quickly soaked through — until the streets and the alleys and the bars began to look like photographs he had seen in the wartime _Prophet_. For a while he thought he might go in for a pint but then reminded himself if he did it was likely he would not come out. He did not recall the last time he had drunk himself into an actual stupor; it had probably been at Alphard’s flat in Cowley in ’83. Certainly there was enough to drink about now: everything he had said to Remus, and everything Remus had said to him, the familiar emotional stalemate, and how fervently he had hated, hated this person he also loved, for thirteen years, because of a lie, an obvious lie, in retrospect, which he had wholeheartedly believed. And Remus: _that was my price, my whole price_. After ’78 he didn’t like to be held nor snuck up on and sometimes during sex he seemed very far away; his eyes were open but glazed over, and his hands were still across Sirius’s shoulders. Sirius had been too wrapped up in his own shit to see and perhaps if he had seen — but there was no point thinking about it that way anymore. 

_Do not disturb._

Eventually he found himself on a familiar block but he did not quite remember why it was familiar until he came upon the Hotel Rome. In the interim years the neighborhood had improved somewhat but the hotel itself still looked like the kind of place Muggle cops staked out in plainclothes in search of solicitation and drug arrests. The blue tile on the threshold demarcating the name of the place was chipped and hardly legible and more than a few panes of glass in the windows and doors were boarded with plywood but lights were on inside and from a high window came a peal of raucous laughter. 

He had a thought — just a thought. The door creaked loudly when he opened it and the woman at the desk looked up. “Looking for Starla,” Sirius said. 

The woman pointed up the stairs. “Room 6J.” 

No longer were there junkies in the stairwell but the bowled marble of each step seemed deeper and the windows were still spiderwebbing cracks. He remembered performing this trudge every couple days when he would go to the discount grocery store for sandwich fixings and salty Muggle crisps and then wait on the corner for the drug dealer he had befriended who supplied him regularly with coke and sometimes with other selections. Then upstairs he would lie in bed and chemically self-Obliviate. 

He knocked on the door to 6J. His heart did a kind of falling somersault when he heard the familiar Cockney accent. “Who is it?” 

“Old friend,” he said. 

He felt like a complete fucking absurd idiot but when Starla opened the door, clad in a lacy dressing gown and not much else, she said, with a spreading smile, as though she had expected him, “Oh, it’s you.” 

“Yes,” he said, “hi.” 

“Come in.” 

She sat on the bed and he sat in the windowsill. “I’m waiting for somebody so you’ll have to be quick,” she said. “But we could do a bump.” 

“I don’t do coke anymore,” Sirius said, though perhaps the nostalgic sense memory of being in this place — being in London, investigating Dark machinations, feeling wild with guilt — made him dearly wish even just for half a line, to shock everything else out of his mind. He always recalled “Station to Station” — “it’s not the side effects of the cocaine… I’m thinking that it must be love…” 

“Well then,” Starla said, leaning over to the bedside table and rooting through the brimming ashtray, “I have a joint.” 

Together they smoked it. Sitting close to her he saw she did not look much older than she had in ’81 because of the quantity of makeup she wore. “Can I do something for you?” she asked. 

“Not, like probably not what you think.” 

Her smile showed her crooked teeth; one was smeared with a smudge of her pink lipstick. “I figured.” 

“I wanted to ask, do you remember anything, Starla, anything weird, about the night we were together in the drunk tank?” 

“You mean besides how you got us out?” 

“Yeah, besides that.” 

“Well I woke up when they carried you in but it was a funny they.” 

“Who’s that?” 

“It wasn’t cops.” 

Pure strange calm. Eye of the storm. Perhaps it was simply the pot. He tried to remember but he had been so drunk. There was nothing — it was a black well. The between-stars stuff of Dementors. He had drowned it all. He remembered thinking perhaps he wanted to die. 

“What did they — ” 

“You’ll laugh but — I swear to god I never hallucinated drunk. My first thought was they was Mycroft Holmes and Gandalf the Grey.” Mr. Smith and Dumbledore. “And they had you — Gandalf had your ankles and Mycroft had you under the arms. The cop just held the door. The same cop that let us out.” 

“Did they say — ”

“They didn’t say nothing at all. I was pretending to be asleep see.” 

“Right.” 

“They dropped you on the floor and out they went. You were fucking soused. They ought to’ve pumped your stomach, I was thinking.” 

Every medical procedure that had ever been conducted upon him had been so conducted when he was ill in his bedroom at Grimmauld Place by “doctors” who had often been dismissed from reputable establishments of magical healing due to unethical projects or experiments. He had never seen a Muggle syringe. The first time he had seen Muggle medicine at all was in ’79 when the healers were obliged to give Remus potions on IV drips and close the several lacerations with stitches because the cursed wounds would not heal with magic. That morning in the drunk tank he had indeed woken up with aches and pains but it all had been rather diffused by the hangover and the horror. Now it seemed perhaps — 

They had followed him on his part-suicidal self-medication tour of Muggle London and then they had done something — and they had done it so he would leave Remus to rot. And very nearly it had worked. The pinprick epicenter of an enormous work. There had been one snatched moment in which his grief had disassembled his vigilance and they had waited for that moment and when it seized him they had caught him. He could not even remember what exactly had happened and yet it had altered completely the course of his life. And it had roped him like a lassoed sacrificial calf into the complete construction. His belief had been dearly necessary to the illusion and as such he too was but a piece moved on a chessboard by a familiar hand. 

Only the two of us in the world know this, he realized. In the Chalk Farm flat in bed at night when Remus had been working through the entire Evelyn Waugh oeuvre (appropriate for wartime) Sirius had made what he thought was a joke — “Black and Lupin contra mundum.” It was rather not a joke and as soon as it was vocalized they both knew it and Sirius felt a kind of creeping dread like ivy or a shadow and Remus pressed closer to him, which was rare, nose against his jaw; they were only half-awake, and they had not yet bothered to clean up from sex, and on the street several drunks were fighting. Some days it did indeed feel like the two of them alone defended some grail-sized truth against the world, from the ramparts of this inconspicuous locale. 

“You alright,” Starla asked. 

Perhaps, he thought, head spinning, perhaps it’s just the pot. He stubbed the ember of the joint out in the ashtray on the bedside table and stood, pressing his sweaty palms against his jeans. “Yeah,” he said, “alright. Just, a lot to swallow.” 

“Want to rest for a bit?” 

“I thought you said you had someone — ”

“I can blow him off.” 

He thought she said _blow_ with maybe a little too much emphasis. “It’s — no, thank you. I have to go.” 

She swung one foot hypnotically like a metronome, and her penciled eyebrows cocked toward her bleach-blonde fringe. “Alright.” 

“Thank you,” he said, slipping out into the hallway, and he heard her say, “you’re welcome,” or at least half of it, sliced off as if by a knife, because before the door had even snicked shut he Apparated. 

_Home_ , he was thinking, and when it spat him out on Eynhallow it was pouring rain, dusk-dark, the clouds and mist so thick he could not see across the channel to Mainland. He started running straight out of it as he hadn’t since the ‘80s, up from the sea over the hill toward the henge where Remus crouched at the heelstone, soaked through, eyes shut. His hand was splayed out in a five-point star against the earth to hold himself up and in the chill the skin was frozen pale and the scars and the tattoos bright and vivid. _Do not disturb_. 

He sat down beside Remus in the wet grass and cast a warming charm and an Impervius charm against the rain, hardly thinking; he wrapped his hand around one of Remus’s ankles where the cold clammy skin was visible between the cuff of his jeans and his boots, and he closed his eyes and sent his consciousness into the golden warmth of the resonance. 

Remus had gone in deep, which explained why he hadn’t felt the cold, nor Sirius’s arrival, and Sirius could feel him there — his ragged soul. Feral traces of his magic like the footprints of animals in the snow. Glow of gold in the expanding black room. It wasn’t so much that they communicated as he felt a thought that wasn’t his suddenly fill his mind — _what is this place?_

_I don’t know._

As far as he knew from years of study and research this was not possible. 

_Listen_ , he felt Remus think. 

He listened. The rain — heartbeats, or perhaps the sea. Then a whisper: a sound that dragged a chill up the back of his neck. Repeated intonation in a language he had never heard. In his body he could feel his teeth chattering but it seemed dearly unimportant. The sensation was of an almost physical nostalgia for something he had never himself experienced or perhaps he had only witnessed in fragments — seventh year and the summer following, when he held Remus in the last seconds before his transformation, with their foreheads pressed together, and his hand wrapped the back of Remus’s neck, and Remus grasped his knee, and he felt like he was walking some tightrope edge, and he had chalked it up to simple proximity and practice that he could feel in his very soul the moon pulling up from beneath the horizon like a puppet of clockwork. He had opened his soul to it. Sometimes in seventh year he lay awake in the dormitory and waited for James and Peter’s snores to indicate a depth of sleep that would allow him to sneak across the creaky floorboards into Remus’s bed and he thought about how he did not love Remus _in spite of_ , he loved Remus _because_. At least he hoped it were true. 

This was some sort of manifest history — an endless, breathless loop of time immortalized like an insect in amber — and they were present inside it, and there were no coincidences. 

He felt Remus pull up, like to the surface of still water or a dream, and he followed. The rain slammed upon the spell like a sheer umbrella such that through it even the adjacent stones of the henge were visible only as tall grey blurs like silent monks bearing witness. The resonance was like a thread of hot iron in his own blood, and far away across the water and the islands it thundered. Remus was shivering with cold and otherwise and his lips were nearly blue and he looked at Sirius warily and Sirius pulled him close by the sleeve of the slicker coat at first just to try another warming charm but it seemed almost accidentally their lips and teeth met clashing and shaking and chattering and nearly violent, and Sirius tasted blood. Warm saltwater blood thick as iron and hollowness and rain. Remus’s nose was cold, his mouth was cold; under the slicker coat the loose layers of Sirius’s old clothes stuck to him showing his bones like skin upon rotting fruit. 

He recalled — the first mission whereupon his life had been in danger. October, perhaps November, 1978. Remus had been training with Dumbledore and a few other Order operatives who would attempt undercover missions (the rest of them were dead before Harry was born) and yet he waited up for Sirius at the kitchen table tracing his finger around the rim of the tumbler of scotch he had emptied. He had made dinner; which had gone cold, and he had a record on the turntable, but he had not bothered to flip it, and it was clear that at some juncture he had realized something was wrong, because he had finished his own cigarettes and stolen the emergency pack Sirius kept in his sock drawer. At the time Sirius was telling himself, I won’t cry; I can’t, I won’t. That was all out the window in perhaps two months but at that juncture he was biting his lip hard to keep it from trembling even as Remus rode him (awkwardly, because his jeans were still around his knees) in the foyer. 

It could not be like that anymore, reminded a tiny needling part of his mind, after all it had been sixteen years since either of them could afford to respond to anything with rabid desperation. And it had been thirteen years since he had so much as touched anyplace on Remus’s bare skin. Maybe this was sacred, said the tiny piece, perhaps it was meant to be a kind of ritual, after all he could feel the thread of resonance and how it crept up through him where he touched the ground and it crept up through Remus himself like a conduit and how he warmed to Sirius’s touch and how at last he dared to touch the crenelated ridge of Sirius’s teeth with his tongue — to loosen Sirius’s hair where he had tied it up and thread his fingers at the nape of Sirius’s neck… 

When Remus pulled away he thought it was almost the same way the wolf looked at him when Remus had taken Wolfsbane. _It’s only me_. Which of course was the problem. His lips were pink from kissing and there was a slick of spit at the bend of his jaw that glinted in the strange light. “Where did you,” he said, “where did you go?” 

“London.” 

“What did you — ” 

He didn’t finish. The rain upon the roof of magic beating inexorable tattoo like a drummer leading the march to war. Instead he kissed Sirius again, and far off across the water it thundered. With his eyes shut tight this was like riding a broomstick, or like dancing. Remus’s breath inside his skull. Like an unripe fruit, somehow, tough with bitterness and yielding at the heart — yielding around the stone core. 

They fought one another out of their coats (the sleeve of Sirius’s caught on his watch and Remus’s slicker was so drenched the soft red flannel lining was dewy) and he pressed Remus back into the grass and rucked his t-shirt up showing the vivid cage of his ribs like a musical instrument out of some horrorshow orchestra — dusky rose-gray flash of his nipple, of his underarm hair, which was thin and colorless. Greyback’s ancient tearing brand which Sirius pressed his own mouth to, and Remus’s eyes fluttered shut. Somewhere in every long rime of scarring like a smear of paint Remus had marked with ink and a needle the do not disturb sigil; some of the marks were so old they had smudged and blurred and bled into the skin, others were fresher, and the disparate dots were visible like a whorl of stardust. He pressed a kiss everyplace he could see it and he ached — he knew it did not cover every scar. 

For a moment they had to pull back to get each other’s shirts off but they did not speak. Somewhere Sirius’s rapidly dissolving sense reminded him perhaps something should be vocalized. Like, you have my forgiveness and I want to beg for yours. Like, don’t you feel like perhaps we are the only two people living in the world with our knowledge? Like, there is no one else I should ever have trusted… Instead he pressed his mouth again to Remus’s mouth and underneath him Remus shifted a thigh between his legs. It was not cold anymore, and each kiss felt more and more reflexive, as though it had not in fact been so very long at all — but he felt the long gentle sweep of Remus’s hands around his breastbone and shoulders and collar and ribs and in the dip of his spine, remembering, he thought, re-memorizing, searching for a navigational pattern that must have been stolen from him… 

Remus looked not so much like the bones of a person as like the bones of a burnt-out village in the autumn dusk, in the rain, like a sort of quiet backwater wreckage cautiously excavated with a mind to traps and hauntings. And yet somehow even after how much of him had been gouged away his eyes went deeper. In there was like the room — 

He pressed down to kiss Remus’s neck and Remus pressed up against him and a spark kindled low in his gut. Against his ear he heard Remus’s soft sigh, almost relieved, so he pressed down again. That molten something spread all over and he could not be certain if the swarming golden static was his loose feral magic or the resonance of that place or some tandem manifestation of this feeling… Certainly it was more seductive than only friction which hadn’t really done much for him since clothed rubbing had lost its sanctified ranking as the only tool in his sexual wheelhouse around the beginning of fifth year at Hogwarts. 

You can’t, said his sense, rapidly dissolving, you can’t, you shouldn’t, but instead he pressed his thigh between Remus’s legs and pushed close and this time Remus’s sigh said, _at last_ … 

He pressed his lips in the soft piece under Remus’s ear, felt the heartbeat there, rocked against him, and Remus rocked back. The last time they had gotten off like this — like teenagers — had perhaps been in one of their beds in the dormitory at Hogwarts when they had been too possessed with it to get all the way out of their clothes. He remembered in a stoned shuffle of blurry slides — as it had been then so was their kissing now little more than a wet and breathy toothy clashing of lips secondary and complimentary to the molten dragging friction elsewhere and with his every motion he heard Remus’s breath fill him almost desperately with the hitch in it that meant he felt good, he wanted more — 

In Remus’s eyes was like the room — his hand was tangled in Sirius’s hair at the back of his neck. They breathed each other’s breath. He remembered the first time he had watched Remus come. It felt like parting the fucking Red Sea to watch — to know his touch was the cause of such unravelling. All the consideration and care with which Remus operated in the world disassembled willfully because he did not mind if Sirius saw. He was altogether completely impossible and for a very long time he had been gone and the place where he had been should have eaten him up entire but it had not and now he was here under Sirius again in the possessing unfocus of this feeling — like the room — expansive and brimming inside the earth an unmappable vault of power that went on and on forever into history, into ancient ritual and compulsion, into the very blue-water well-spring of all things — 

He turned his lips to Remus’s forearm tattooed with the sketch of Stonehenge and kissed the blue smudge of the heelstone and Remus made a sound like something swallowed. Sirius thought perhaps he could have wept. Instead he came. 

\--

They lay together in the tall grass unspeaking until the rain lessened, and after a while Sirius lifted the Impervius charm. Dusk had begun to gather in the islands and the sky seemed to glow to the West where behind the clouds the sun dipped ever lower. Remus had wrapped himself again in the slicker coat and with his brow furrowed tightly he watched the clouds as though for signs written in them, or approaching owls. Their shoulders pressed together and their hips and knees. He had forgotten this was a sort of simple balm — just their closeness. It had been even when they were young. Perhaps he was lulled by it, or by sex or the smell of the autumn rain, and something he had forgotten jolted through him like distant lightning suddenly after who knew how long — “Did you, Remus, you came, right?” 

Remus’s mouth twitched and the corners of his eyes folded. He turned his almost-smiling face to Sirius and said, “Yes,” but Sirius was not sure he believed him, though he forgot it quickly, because Remus kissed him again, and when he pulled back he asked, “What happened in London.” 

It felt like the previous events of the day had happened in another world. To think that very morning they had fought — to think that Harry had written, that he would have to compete in the Triwizard Tournament… Recalling again what Starla had said perhaps just an hour earlier was like a fresh blow. “In ‘81 I tried to come to your trial and they wouldn’t let me in,” he started. He did not doubt Dumbledore had told Remus this at one juncture or another; it seemed like the kind of protracted emotional torture mechanism he knew — now concretely firsthand — the old man favored. “So I got screaming wasted and woke up in a Muggle drunk tank. I found the girl I was in there with and she said cops didn’t bring me in but these two men she hadn’t seen before.” 

“Dumbledore — ”

“Yes, and Mr. Smith, from the Ministry.” 

Remus exhaled shakily through his nose and then slowly and delicately he moved as if nervous to and in the gentle rain and the coming night wind he rested his head on Sirius’s chest with his ear beside his heartbeat. His hair was still wet and his hand was clammy cold and restless where he rested it on Sirius’s ribs. 

“They had to make me believe you were guilty because I didn’t,” Sirius told him, like for the thousandth fucking time; likely it wouldn’t ever be enough. He wrapped his hand around the narrow shoulder in the slicker coat. _I tried, I tried, I tried everything…_ “I didn’t believe them. Until they — ”

Remus’s grip tightened against his ribs and Sirius felt against his own skin when he pressed his eyes tightly closed.

_They broke_ , he thought, _they broke me, they broke my magic,_ but with broken magic he had saved Remus’s life, and he had caught the rat, and he had become a respected academic of magical theory, and besides whatever they had put him through they had put Remus through worse. 

They were quiet for a moment, listening to the wind, and then Remus said suddenly, “There are no buried remains here.” At first Sirius thought he was reciting a poem. His fingers drummed rhythmically against Sirius’s ribs. “I read the terramancy.” 

“What do you think that means?” 

“There was or maybe there still is another way. Or this is something more.” He sat up, crossing his legs; the slicker coat around his narrow shoulders was like a highwayman’s cloak, black and waterlogged, and he held Sirius’s forearm, palm against the inside, and Sirius recalled in a bright guilty shock how nearly every evening after ’79 in the Chalk Farm flat he had checked —

“What do you mean something more,” Sirius asked, to keep himself from saying something else. 

Remus’s thumb pressed against the vividest blue vein. “He likes to kill as many birds as he can at once. So I don’t — it can’t be random, that he sent us here, don’t you agree?” Sirius nodded; Remus’s eyes had fixed him, but then he turned again toward the heelstone. “It’s just a feeling,” he said, softly, nervous, and in the dusk light the shadows of the stones stretched, and Sirius thought he already knew what Remus might say. “And I don’t — I could only feel it, like so deep in, and then a little — just a thread, on the full moon, but it felt like, Sirius — ” 

Remus covered his eyes with his free hand; he did not want to say it, because saying it would open it up for review and analysis. “What is it?” 

With Remus holding his forearm like this he could hold Remus’s as well like they were each pulling one another out of some abyss. Remus’s irrepressible heartbeat there still a little quick with the events of the day. “Like a cure,” he said at last. 

“Right,” Sirius said, “I thought so too, and I can show you, when we get inside, the runes from the spell history — ” 

Remus nodded. “I think, what if he saw, the Wolfsbane potion wasn’t enough? Or the materials are expensive or you can’t — it’s not exactly attractive for trial because it tastes fucking worse than death and basically the major difference is you remember all of getting unceremoniously folded up and stretched on a rack and rammed into an animal’s body.”

“What about the bloodlust bit?” 

“You know some werewolves like that part. And besides even with Wolfsbane the bite is still contagious.” Unsaid: it could perhaps become a device for ease of hunting, for those of Greyback’s predilection. 

“A cure in a spell series is of course far easier not to mention painless but I mean ancient runic spells are not famously translatable into the latinate and most of them aren’t even supposed to work anymore.” 

“Perhaps he thought, if we were here together and we fought — about what he set up — ”

“That you would try it.” 

Remus nodded. “Yes.” 

“Would you — do you think you would ever?” 

“I won’t do anything,” Remus said measuredly, “I have even the slightest suspicion he requires me to do.” 

Sirius sat up and kissed him and he tensed a fraction then seemed to melt, and Sirius kissed him again, his lower lip and his jaw and his neck and the button of his shoulder — birchpaper skin — just inside the collar of the slicker coat. “Brave man,” he said. The smile Remus gave him felt very rare and secret. Something to keep in a hidden fold of his wallet or in a locked safe or in a Gringotts vault defended by dragons. 

“No,” Remus told him, “it’s only spite. And some righteous fury.” 

“Is that all?” 

Remus fixed him. Neither of them had ever been all that good at vocalizing this sort of thing. But at last his eyes softened just a bit, and he said, “Don’t be daft.” 

Together they went inside and changed out of their wet clothes. In the kitchen Sirius fixed a bastardized pasta primavera whilst Remus (like a Symbolist painting summoning pure nostalgia in a wool sweater and plaid boxer shorts and not much else) filtered through the pages of spell history. “I broke,” he said at last, “I’m sorry. I broke your copy of _Lust for Life_.” 

It took him a while to look up from the notes and on the hotplate the water was boiling. He really did look sorry and Sirius remembered, tripping fuck, dancing, or perhaps just swaying on the spot, and he was thinking about a Muggle theory he’d heard about from someone in the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts department, which was the notion that in fact existing in the world was simply enacting a sort of computer program, because you could only after all be certain of your own consciousness, but he had been thinking about how he was certain of Remus’s consciousness, perhaps as much as he was certain of his own, and then he started thinking of Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,” and so he pressed his face into Remus’s neck and breathed just to stop thinking about it, but it didn't really work, because he was thinking, even if something hacked into my mainframe and rerouted all the wires still this would be. And of course in the end it was. 

“It’s alright,” Sirius told him, at last, in the expanding elastic silence, “it’s — I broke actually, my original copy, in ’82.” He had broken some, sold some, and burned a few in the fireplace at Alphard’s Cowley penthouse. He had kept Remus’s parents records because he didn’t suppose he had anything against Remus’s parents and besides in those days he had relished for some reason listening to Patsy Cline when drunk and he figured if his inheritance ran out he could sell the _Hunky Dory_ test pressing. “There’s a lot of them still in storage at Hogwarts that belong to you rightfully. But I did give away your copy of _The Stooges_.” 

“Ah,” Remus said, “yes, that’s alright.” 

“And _In the Court of the Crimson King_. And _Here Come the Warm Jets_.” He found he couldn’t shut his fucking mouth. “I kept all your Talking Heads but I could hardly stand to listen to it.” 

“I couldn’t hardly either toward the end,” Remus said. He was looking past Sirius unfocusedly. It seemed every single thing he did was remembering. “The water’s boiling,” he pointed out at last. 

While they ate Sirius put on _Fear of Music_ , and afterward he quickly cleaned the dishes with magic. Under the table Remus was tapping his heel off-rhythm. He thought about writing a letter to Dumbledore but so much as touching the door of the truth of it made him want to raze something to the ground. There was a book of not so much Dark magic, but almost — Minerva had always called it “amoral magic,” magic of neither Dark morals nor light, but magic that was altogether neutral — which Sirius had confiscated from students about nine thousand times at Hogwarts; it was titled _Veritas Vos Liberabit_ : truth will set you free. Most of it was experimental or conspiracy. And anyway it rather felt like all truth did was put you in a different size box, because it seemed no truth constituted full disclosure. Always there was a glassless window boarded and through the thick plywood nothing was visible. 

Unless you could live without principles truth consigned you to certain fights, he thought, sitting across from Remus, who had left him the good chair. To know the truth at the root of one’s bondage or one’s manipulation was not to loosen one’s shackles. But he figured he had better write to Harry. He dug a piece of parchment out from the milk crate; he was running low, and reminded himself to stop by the stationary store on his next trip to Mainland. 

_I am so very sorry for not replying sooner, and thank you for your help telling me about those mirrors,_ Sirius wrote. _But we can talk a little more about that later. Re: your competition in the tournament, a few things. 1) I take it the other schools are Beauxbatons and Durmstrang? Last time I checked the French and German magic schools were the only ones licensed to bring students to the UK without excruciating paperwork and Hogwarts has reliable relationships with those two (believe it or not there are a few others in both France and Germany but they are rather more recently established and also very new-agey). Most of the Triwizard Tournaments ever undertaken as far as I know have been among our three schools though I have heard the Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans do one amongst themselves which is probably very exciting. But you should at the very least count yourself lucky you are not competing against any wizards or witches from North America as they have very different core curricula and at least in the states Unforgivable Curses can be utilized rather willy-nilly. BUT if you are indeed competing against students from Beauxbatons and Durmstrang… Last I heard from them Igor Karkaroff was the Durmstrang headmaster; he was a Death Eater in the days of the war but also a bit of a coward. In fact he served about a month in Azkaban before he turned in a few who were still at large in exchange for a pardon… as far as I know among their ranks betrayal of the sort is a crime punishable by death so he probably wants You Know Who to return as little as we do. Thus I don’t think you need to worry about him too much._

_And 2) as for the Veela girl you are competing against — as you may have discerned from seeing the two-way mirrors or perhaps you have just discerned it from being aware and having your eyes open, something is happening with regard to part-humans, like vampires and werewolves and Veela and merfolk and etc., and I am not sure entirely what it is. We know that there are attempts underway to develop potions and spell series or all out “cures” to allow all part-human groups to assimilate into wizarding culture. Certainly this sounds like it could be nice but these experiments are being conducted in unfair ways — like on those kids you saw at the school. And besides what if someone told you “everything won’t be alright, and you'll still be treated unfairly, but maybe to make other wizards more comfortable, you should dye your hair and cover up your scar”? ANYWAY with regard to your new Veela friend it is likely the two of you are very much in this together. She has been set up (much as you have) likely so that something can be blamed on her to achieve political ends. I know it’s weird and scary and a lot on your shoulders. But remember she is on your side._

_Try to trust her, and trust your friends, and you can write to me whenever you need to; I’ll try and talk to Dumbledore about getting our Floo on-line, so you can just stick your head in the fireplace if you need it._

_Talk soon, S_

When he looked up he saw across the table Remus was writing a letter too. “Amelia Nguyen invited me to be a guest on her show,” he said. 

Sirius had no doubt the request had not come unsolicited. “Okay,” he said, “right.” 

“I can’t sit still and watch. I don’t want to be — it can’t just be the two of us who know all this.” 

“Dumbledore could hear it,” Sirius said; “so could Gr— ”

“They both will, likely,” Remus interrupted, and he rolled the parchment paper tightly and sealed it with a quick spell from Sirius’s wand. “Clearly someone needs to fucking tell them both neither of the routes they want to take with us are survivable.” 

“It doesn’t have to be — ” Sirius started, but then he stopped. 

Remus had risen to fetch the owl from the cage by the coatrack. “Are you done with your letter?” he asked. 

Of course it had to be him. It had to. 

They bound both letters to the owl’s foot and sent him off and then Remus asked to listen to Talking Heads’ _Remain in Light_ , which they did in a funny and persistent silence, and Sirius moved the good chair to sit close beside him and touch his knee, where the skin was soft and cool, and the sigil he had tattooed into the scarring just above. 

“This I remembered,” Remus said, and he pointed at the record which Sirius had set spinning in midair as David Byrne sang, “take a look at these hands — take a look at these hands — the hand speaks — the hand of a government man — ” 

“You used to sit on the couch and listen — ”

“I remember, yes, that too. When I got out, when I was swimming, every song came back to me at once.” 

“Just a wild blaring.” 

“Yes.” He laughed a little. “Like an orchestra warming up.” 

He tried to think of every record he loved that had come out between 1981 and 1993 that he would have to let Remus listen to once he had all his records back and a turntable, once all this was over and they could lie in bed all day listening to vinyl and Summoning food from the kitchen as they had done in the London flat. He would have to explain to Remus the whole eighties in terms of cultural zeitgeist, which seemed a daunting task. He wondered if he could acquire a Pensieve just for the purpose. It seemed rather inconsequential now… but to think an entire decade missed could be inconsequential… 

At the end of the record they went unspeaking into the bedroom under the cool Disillusioned veil and lay together in the bed. The wind through the draught smelled like old rain and behind the stained lace curtain and the sheaf of grey-cotton clouds Sirius could make out the blue-pale light of the still-shrinking moon. Under the rough sheets and the heavy blanket their bare feet and legs twined. Remus’s toes, as they had always been, were very cold. He was asleep before Sirius was and he knew certainly if Remus had not liked to be held after ’78 surely he still didn’t but it was a bit of a wrench to fall asleep with his arms so empty when he knew… Yet in the night — when the the clouds had blown off completely in the distant winds — he woke with dreams to find Remus had moved close enough Sirius could feel his ponderous sleeping breath at the crook of his neck and shoulder. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to @malapropism for their help with amelia's radio show.

He dreamt — in the dream he was younger and the church on the island was not yet built, and he stood at the henge with his parents and Sirius and James, and Dorcas and Marlene, and Dearborn and the Prewitts and even Fenwick, and Lily, who held the baby, and Alice and Frank, with their baby, and Molly and Arthur with their brood of redheads (the oldest holding the youngest), and all the rest of them, even and especially the dead ones, who were bright and joyous in life, and Marlene and Dorcas were holding hands, which he did not think they had ever dared when they lived, though it had been a common fact that they were lovers, or at least it had been to Remus. They were all smiling, and the sky was clear, and his mother was holding his elbow, and he remembered her — in the future present past she had carried him through the fields. 

It will work, he thought, it will work, it will. He knelt in the high grass. In one voice they spoke — 

The dream changed. He was waiting — he sat with Sirius at the henge as the moon rose. This he would remember — had remembered — in death, how they sat together, and waited, and Sirius touched him — held him — and he thought, this isn’t it’s not it isn’t, it isn’t safe, but he couldn’t put the words in his mouth, and he bit his tongue, until he tasted blood, and Sirius kissed his temple. “Alright,” he said, the sound of his voice flowed, like water, words into words, “alright, almost there, Moony, Moony Love — ” 

The moon pulled up — like a spotlight or a marionette. It touched him, and it only was. 

He woke, in the big bed in the cottage on Eynhallow, and in the kitchen Sirius was playing a record he didn't know, and he smelled bacon. In the cloudy silvering mirror on the dresser when he sat up there was a hickey on his neck. I’m too fucking old for this, he thought; after all he was getting to thirty-five. I’m too fucking old for this and anyway my cock doesn’t work. In their exploratory dusk frottage of the previous evening he hadn’t come and he had lied to Sirius about it, because it seemed like the polite thing to do, and he didn’t want Sirius to worry, and he should have come, because it had been completely hypnotically intensely overwhelming, being covered and kissed and touched like that, after so very long, sensory overload, and the sound the sound the slamming percussion of the rain — 

In Azkaban they had played his memories like a club DJ played records and the sex he could recall when spun appropriately was not so much about fucking and/or orgasm as it was, you had this once and you left it — because you did not believe he truly loved you. And now no one does and no one ever will again. 

His head had neither time nor space for it and neither did his body. In his mind there were no more compartments and everything echoed as in some cavernous symphonic hollow. Like an ivy-swallowed bandshell on the grounds of an estate gone to seed. It ran from one place to another with a dogged speed and it stitched feelings to images and memories to history in some Frankenstein tapestry of confused belonging and still sometimes when he was alone it seemed to play every single song he knew at once just to drown out the silence. 

Maybe if it happened slowly. He lay down again and watched out the window at the sea and the moving clouds. It would rain again; of course it would rain again; it was coming to be autumn in Scotland. If it happened slowly, in the bed, and they could get a little stoned before, which had always sort of helped, in the very bad days toward the very end when everyone they loved was dead or dying or rabidly hunted and he was certain it was Sirius’s fault but still Dumbledore said, I need you to keep an eye on him, and Sirius would come home and there was blood under his fingernails and he looked wrung out, wan and cold, and like not so long ago (perhaps in the men’s bathroom down the hall from the Auror office) he had been crying, and Remus ached for him and hated and loved him in equal measure and when they kissed it tasted like salt… If he could lasso his mind into one time and place. If he could focus and focus enough to think or not think which as of yet still eluded him. 

He remembered — technicolor visions of moments like slides tearing and pale and unfocusing with age and loaded improperly into the rotator (his mother had had one, inherited from her Muggle parents) and snatched away as quickly and only darkness spliced between — all their skin in the pale day. The sun that spread through the window upon the floor and their breakfast dishes were abandoned on the table and he felt so naked, he felt wide open to the whole world. 

It had been so long since he had even touched himself with intent. He closed his eyes and remembered. The cool touch of his own fingers alongside the ridge of his hips and belly under the sweater sent up through him a warmish lightning thrill. 

The creaking echo of Sirius’s footsteps across the floor of the other room — the other room. In the flat in London he would get up sometimes in the early morning to pee or let his owl in and come back to bed and in the dawn light while Remus was still half-asleep Sirius would slip his underwear down and nuzzle into the nook of his hip and thigh, lick ribbons across his hardening cock, jerk them together until they both came. Then they would fall asleep again. He tried to recall the exactness of that feeling. Their summer sweat where their skin touched, where they had both rucked their shirts up, and how artful Sirius’s body looked, like a lost canvas of Caravaggio’s, and his eyes’ sleepy focus, and his staying hand against the small of Remus’s back. Cautiously, imagining, he cupped his palm over himself through the thin soft fabric of his boxer shorts. Feeling altogether fucking thirteen years old he pressed the heel of his hand back and forth and breathed with the rhythm of it. With his nose pressed against the pillow the echo of his breathing in his ears could almost encompass another’s. 

In the dorm at Hogwarts, he remembered, the first time he had condescended to let Sirius inside him, whilst James and Peter were both at the Yule Ball or more likely in the bushes outside the Yule Ball ensconced in warming charms with very patient women. Remus and Sirius had gone down to the Great Hall for about ten minutes toward the beginning of the night, royally fucking stoned, and Sirius was wearing red velvet dress robes about which he laughed hysterically whenever he saw his reflection. Something had been whispered in Remus’s ear that Sirius had probably meant to be seductive but which was in fact hilarious and together they went back to the dorm and struggled through the complicated undressing and then while they were kissing naked in Remus’s bed, in which he had done so much furtive masturbating trying very hard not to think of this exact potentiality, Sirius’s hand on his cock slipped lower than it had heretofore dared. They had both done this before with other people but it wasn’t as if that had made them any good at it. It was uncomfortable and yet Remus found for the first time with this kind of sex he wanted more of it but wasn’t sure exactly how to communicate as such and for his part Sirius looked overwhelmed, or like he might start to cry. Outside the window it was snowing. Sirius came inside him after all of two minutes and then sucked him off and then they lay together in the bed watching the blizzard outside. James and Peter came back to the dorm around three AM, long after Sirius had retreated to his own bed for secrecy purposes, and they were extremely fucking blasted on the spiked punch, and James was loudly singing Joy to the World, because he had finally managed to get Lily off. 

Everything was like — a truck spinning out on black ice. He couldn’t keep his head one place if he tried. Eventually he gave up before he chafed himself raw and went into the kitchen, where Sirius was making omelets. 

\--

Sirius’s owl returned late that day laden down with a parcel as well as return letters from Harry and Amelia. 

_The package_ , Amelia had written, _contains an untraceable Portkey which will take you directly into my studio on Monday October 3 at 7:45pm. I’ve got an untraceable Portkey here which will take you back to your location on Monday October 3 at 10:00pm precisely. I can also fast-forward that time up if we have to get you out quickly for any reason._

_The way this works is I usually cover current events of relevance to the part-human community from promptly at 8pm until 8:15-20 or so and then I welcome the guest on. I have not made any mention of your guest appearance to anyone except my engineers. We’ll have a conversation the two of us for a bit and then we can open it up to callers if you are comfortable probably around 9. Usually we manage to take about five before I have to close with PSAs and sign off at 10 on the dot._

_Let me know as soon as you can if there’s anything you don’t want to talk about. I like to have sort of a list of prompts to discuss / ask you about so let me know anything that’s off the table and we’ll steer clear of it._

_See you soon and wishing you well, A. Nguyen_

The Portkey Amelia had packed was, humorously, a 7” single of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” She had stuck a sticky note to the cover upon which she had drawn a smiley face with vampire fangs. 

Sirius was still reading the letter from Harry which was very long. Remus took a piece of parchment from the stack of Sirius’s notes and wrote back quickly:

_Amelia, thank you for the Portkey. This sounds great. I am happy to take callers. And I am fine to talk about anything. I want to try and be honest about this whole fiasco and I could use the challenge. Keep me posted with any updates. Otherwise see you on 3 October — RJL_

“How is he,” Remus asked, rolling up his tear of parchment to bind to the owl’s foot, when Sirius put Harry’s letter down upon the table. 

Sirius scrubbed his hands through his hair as he did when in the throes of a dilemma showing the fine runic signature of his widow’s peak more prominent now than it had been in ’81. “Hard to tell via letter,” he said. “Nervous, no doubt; he does that thing, do you remember when James would write letters in the summer and he would write like twenty lines without any punctuation?” 

Remus had not in fact remembered until he was reminded whereupon he recalled: _Honestly all this just has me so overwhelmed and I don’t know what to do like I guess everyone has an “is my girlfriend pregnant” scare at least once in their teenagerdom but if Evans found out oh my god I spent all last night lying in bed staring at the ceiling I feel like such a girl and then I had this dream that she was pulling all my teeth out with those what do you call those implements we used in Potions when we made the special shrinking solution with all those flobberworm stomachs? She is going to completely fucking hate me even more than she already does if she finds out about all this and if she finds out that I somehow completely cocked up the easiest birth control potion in the book and you know Mary Floo’d me in the living room last night thank GOD my parents had gone to bed and told me I was a lousy lay anyway and as such she expects me to pay in full for the abortion? Which I guess I can manage but that means I will definitely have to sit out going to Ibiza with you all and Frank and Benj but fuck this makes me feel like such useless scum that this is what I’m so panicked about and she might be fucking PREGNANT…_

It turned out of course Mary MacDonald had not been pregnant but it was definitely true that James had been lousy at sex which every girl in their year including Lily had subsequently heard, and in the end none of them had gone to Ibiza, because Frank had come down with mono, because he had started hooking up with Alice who had gotten it from Dorcas, and it had been him who had suggested Ibiza to begin with because he was obsessed at the time with Italo disco and had recently discovered cocaine. 

Remus asked Sirius, “Does he know anything about the first task yet?” 

“Yes,” Sirius said, “That’s what this is all about. It’s dragons. On Halloween.” 

“Tell him to go for the eyes.” 

“Yes,” said Sirius, “that’s the commonly understood strategy.” He ran his hands through his hair again. “How the fuck is a fourteen year old going to fight a dragon.” 

“He isn’t a normal fourteen year old.” 

“He is,” said Sirius, gently, “that’s the problem. He is in every way but one.” It will be thirteen years precisely, on Halloween, Remus did not say; they were both thinking it. “What else,” said Sirius, “besides the eyes.” 

“They move slowly,” Remus said, remembering; he had visited a centaur band who shepherded a few in the Shetlands in 1980. “They sort of move like a Muggle toy in all disparate parts. And they like music.” 

“They like music,” Sirius said skeptically, but he smiled a little. 

“D’you remember when I went to visit the centaurs, and they had dragons? They were older ones, or they were maimed or sick or something, so they were pretty calm, but when they weren’t, they had these harps they would play. I thought maybe the harps were spelled and I asked about it and they said no it was just music and any music that would do it for them. But you know, centaurs…” 

“I had forgotten about that.” 

“It was a trip. They read my star chart or whatever and told me I was a cosmic accident.” 

“But they threw in with you anyway.” 

“Yes, well, they said accidents sometimes can be good, but disturbances like You Know Who were never.” It had rained the whole time he was there without exception and as neither the centaurs nor dragons seemed to feel it he had shrouded himself the whole time in an Imperturbable charm which they found utterly pathetic and hilarious. “You could also tell Harry a Patronus can’t hurt.” 

“Yes, that was the patented Auror Method, start with the ghost beast and move from there…” 

As Sirius wrote the response and suggestions Remus went through the spell history notes and the translations Sirius had gleaned from one of his dictionaries with a mind to the dream from earlier that morning. Certainly it seemed, at least at this site, a cure had been possible. _Community ritual_ , Sirius had written, underlining the first word. _Protection / emancipation / independence / freedom._ It was a sort of graduation or extension of the concepts of the ritual emancipation legend. A purer, primordial version. Latinate spells did not have the same power, and often they captured the symbolic over the actual. At some juncture the concept of a presumed master or possessor had changed culturally from the condition itself to the being who had communicated it. 

The runes were so old there was no record of how they were spoken. Perhaps they had been drawn. It was the sort of magical performance that had been summoned from resonance before humans possessed individualized magical ability, or at least according to the prevailing literature. If a cure was in it which was beginning to seem more and more likely then it was locked very tightly and perhaps opening it would manifest something altogether very different than expected. 

He had thought his whole conscious life if there was even the barest ghost of a chance he would take it. But now there was and he could not — would not. He wondered what this made him. 

\--

At 7:45pm on October 3 Sirius kissed Remus’s cheek for good luck just before the Portkey snatched him off Eynhallow into the green room of an abandoned Muggle college’s radio station just outside Port Talbot, Wales. Amelia Nguyen was waiting for him on the stained and dusty futon couch nursing a vivid red-black liquid in a Muggle backpacker’s water bottle and absently looking over a few pages of notes on a yellow legal pad; she was tall and had cut her thick black hair short and unevenly and one could not necessarily elucidate her condition — she didn’t have any particular pallor, nor fang scars in her neck — until she smiled, showing her teeth, and shook his hand, and her skin was cool as marble. She was wearing a black t-shirt that said _88.6FM — All the news the Ministry doesn’t want you to hear._ “They’re finishing up in the studio,” she said; it was strange to hear her voice from her own mouth, rather than over the airwaves. “The previous show is like, the Wizarding world’s _Behold a Pale Horse;_ it’s funded by the _Quibbler_.” 

“I didn’t know the _Quibbler_ could afford to fund anything.” 

“Neither did I, but I guess they’re actually receiving grant money from enough eccentric inbreds worldwide…” She smiled brilliantly; God, her teeth were sharp, she could have torn his throat out with minimal pressure. “I’m so happy, like so happy to have you here; I’ve been trying to make this happen for a year.” 

She led him down the hall toward the studio with a friendly hand on his shoulder and she showed him the talking points she had lined up (in her neat, square handwriting: _Part-humans in war with Voldemort / wizarding justice system / Veritaserum use in trial / part-human imprisonment_ , et cetera). He wondered if she treated all her guests like this. “Are you excited,” she asked finally, as they waited in the studio’s anteroom with one of the engineers, a Veela girl paying rapt attention to the mixing board and her headphones, while the previous show finished up. In their waiting she had drained to the dregs the water bottle which she had told him had been full of goat’s blood. 

“Yes, definitely, also a bit, um, trepidatious; you know my — the werewolf who turned me, he called in when I listened last week.” 

“Greyback,” Amelia said, “right?” Remus nodded; it tasted too rotten even after all the interim years to say it, or even to say yes. “God, he calls all the fucking time, and once he was like, how can you call yourself a vampire if you’ve never killed a human for their blood… blah blah blah. Classic gatekeeping logic. He probably would say the same for you about not turning anyone.” 

He didn’t ask how she knew he hadn’t. Perhaps she could see it in his face. “He would,” Remus told her; “he has.” 

“He infuriates me,” she said. “There’s so much shit — I know he’s wrong, what he suggests is wrong. But I can’t deny it’s true. I stopped answering his calls but now he just changes phone numbers.” 

In the studio they were wrapping up, and the Veela girl took her headphone off one perfectly sculptural ear (studded here and there with raw golden pieces) and turned to Amelia and Remus. “Are you both ready?” 

“Glass of water, bit of whiskey or anything, Lupin,” Amelia asked. 

“Alright, I think.” 

“Right then,” Amelia said, “ready, Lisl.” 

The _Quibbler-_ sponsored show signed off with a recorded station ID and as the panelists filed out Amelia squeezed past them in the door, gesturing for Remus to follow. The studio was cavernous and hummed with magic and Amelia bustled about turning off all the mics but one to prevent echo as Lisl counted down from ten in the booth with her long beringed fingers. 

_Three, two, one —_

“This is Amelia Nguyen and you’re listening to Interview with the Vampire on 88.6FM, we are transmitting from your backyards and from your basements, from your fields at night, from your offices and from your schools, from Transylvania and Ghawdex and Volhynia and the Maharashtra Coast, we are everywhere, we are legion, we are watching and waiting — together we bear witness to this crazy fucking world… I’m here in our new studio with a special guest I can’t wait to introduce to you all, but first let’s go over everything that happened to our worldwide community in the past week, from the big broad stuff to the great owls we’ve received from listeners…” 

He listened to her voice as she went over her page of notes marked NEWS, crossing off items with a bright purple pen as she spoke about them, riffing off each with connections and theories. Somewhere, he thought, with a twisting chill, somewhere Greyback was listening, but somewhere also Indra was listening, and Sirius was listening, and he could still feel, if he tried hard enough, the warm and soft imprint of Sirius’s lips on his cheek before the tug of the Portkey. The touches Sirius had doled out lately to Remus’s wrists at meals, to his waist at the kitchen sink, to his shoulders in the morning… 

Radio was a funny thing, because it was blind. Amelia had no way of knowing how many people were listening, perhaps six were, perhaps six thousand were. Perhaps six million were. Yet in this room she was speaking to no one, or to the corner of the ceiling. Her voice carried not only through the Muggle broadcasting system’s radius but through whatever magic she and Lisl and the other engineers had invested into all the wiring — it carried through the entire United Kingdom and, from the sound of her introduction, perhaps it carried even further. 

He didn’t realize he was daydreaming until Amelia squeezed his shoulder and flashed her open hand — _five minutes_. His heart and stomach twisted. For the first time he thought, _what the fuck am I doing?_ He had never liked talking about himself, and he had never liked doing class presentations at Hogwarts. But he had survived the war, and Azkaban, and a year on the run; he could survive this. The trick was going to be to pretend there was no one listening. 

“I’m happy to have a special guest with me tonight who’s uniquely positioned to speak to the last point,” Amelia said; _oh, fuck_ , Remus thought, as he had not been listening. Thankfully she went on: “Lately there’s been much talk about part-human roles in the war with You Know Who in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s and I’m happy to have a veteran of that war — and, well, perhaps the most talked-about werewolf in modern British history with me tonight — ” she reached over delicately and with vivid red-lacquered fingernails turned his mic on, and the light beside the switch flashed a clashing _Avada Kedavra_ green — “Mr. Remus Lupin; hi, Remus, how are you?” 

“I’m — I don't think I — well certainly that bloke from the Warren Zevon song is more talked about than me.” 

Amelia laughed. “Maybe those guys from _An American Werewolf in London_.” 

“I sort of rather unsuccessfully boycotted that movie in ’81. Besides, that guy, Amelia, he was American, it’s in the title.” 

“Alright well, after the guy from the Warren Zevon song, the most talked-about werewolf in modern British history.” 

“Fine,” Remus said, “maybe. That’s embarrassing.” 

“I agree, so, the Ministry has stopped pushing stories through the _Prophet_ about your whereabouts, which has suggested to quite a few of my listeners that they’ve uncovered new information that exonerates you — ” 

“Well, they found the person actually responsible for the crimes for which I was convicted. They can’t come clean about it enough to give me a pardon they say to maintain secrecy or whatnot but I’m not convinced.” 

“So you _were_ framed, in ’81.” 

“Yes. Accident of the _Fidelus_ charm, much manufactured distrust, et cetera. Such was the — I guess, the general condition of the war with You Know Who in those days, brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, suspicion and fear… Just about anybody could convince you of anything because everything had happened, every horrible possibility imaginable.” 

“God,” Amelia said, and she smiled at him, “I just have so much to talk to you about, I don’t know where to start.” 

“Wanna start with the obvious, like, with my claim to fame?” 

She laughed. “Alright, well, how did you get out of Azkaban?” 

It was easier than he’d thought it would be; it was just like talking to her, and he found he trusted her implicitly, and she was a good listener. Sometimes she shared quick and complementary stories from her own life — she told him about being part of the first graduating class from Coll School, and being guilted into testing a human blood substitute of goat’s blood fortified with walrus blubber and crushed Valerian root. Of course it had not been successful but she had not been allowed any alternative and as such she had been desperately sick until her family learned of her plight and sent her vials of their blood from Bristol carefully disguised with magic and wrapped in sweaters in their monthly care packages. 

“What would you say is your most sincere piece of advice, from you, a survivor of so much, to the entire part-human community?” 

“Don’t join ranks with You Know Who,” Remus said frankly. “Point-blank. I don’t trust the Ministry either — I don’t know, how can any of us, right now? But I know Dark wizardry isn’t the path to any real acceptance or understanding or peace or fairness… it’s a band-aid, you know, over a gaping wound. Blood purism applies to us too. He sees us as no more fully human than the Ministry does and neither do any of his followers. God forbid, if he enacts the world he wants we will be enslaved for his purposes alongside Muggles and Muggle-born witches and wizards and so-called blood traitors and the rest of it.” 

“I think that, if I may, that’s a perspective that you can more easily come to, with your history and your experiences, but others cannot. For all that you’ve been upheld by many part-humans as a sort of living martyr for the cause you’ve also been afforded more privileges than many of the rest of us.” 

“It’s true.” 

“We’ve all suffered similar bigotry and denial of access but there are Coll School students — and folks incarcerated in part-human prisons and internment camps worldwide for whom wizarding government is this incontrovertible symbol of violence and I think, these overwhelmingly are the folks who are easily swayed by rhetoric from Dark wizarding encampments like the Death Eaters. When, for someone like me, my first thought is, the phrase _Dark wizard_ still has _wizard_ in it.” 

“You’re right. I do have a particular perspective on the matter, I suppose, and it was in my upbringing, my father was a cursebreaker. I sort of conceptualized from my very youth that there was good wizardry and bad. Even before I was bitten.” 

“How did you feel after that?” 

“Oh, I think at first I didn’t really get it, and then my parents would say things like, you’re only a werewolf one day out of the month, it isn’t you, you can’t control it — ”

“I think a lot of human guardians even those who mean well — ”

“Right, they don’t understand what they mean, what they say… But anyway I was beginning to get it, I think, that something about me was innately wrong, and it only sort of compounded when I went to Hogwarts…” 

“Yes, and that’s — ”

“I don’t know, I think something that’s really colored my experience of being a werewolf is the sort of swarming and suffocating desperateness for secrecy and roaring self-hatred, that I was, you know, that I was the only one, and that it was known by the staff and the administration and we all had to keep this big bloody secret together from the rest of the student body, but I didn’t trust them to, and my Defense professor wouldn’t look me in the eyes, and I was terrified my roommates were going to kill me in my sleep…” 

“But they didn’t.” 

“No, they didn’t.” 

“In America, or at least where I’m from in America, part-humans can be a bit more out, but you know about that whole deal now; the American Secretary of Magic calling for a moratorium on part-human immigration… but anyway I think that, that spirit sort of, it never struck me that I had to hide it, until I came here. And so I think, there’s a kind of tickling part of me that says, if we pledge allegiance to You Know Who and unite to destroy the British wizarding establishment as it exists, at least I will be allowed to be a vampire, publicly and loudly…” 

“I think — beyond the vengeance, which I do admit is seductive, there’s an unknown that’s too large.” 

“Logically I’m with you but — sometimes it’s — we’re never allowed to react emotionally. And there’s this piece of me that’s just screaming — ” 

“Yes,” Remus told her, “I remember — feeling it too, in the first war, just — why am I doing all this, why am I putting myself through hell, for these people who demonstrably hate me?” 

“Yes,” Amelia said, “yes, yes, you hit the nail right on the head.” She smiled at him. “It’s 9:15 and I’ve monopolized your attention… I’m sure we have listeners who are dying to ask you questions. Do you want to take some callers?” 

His stomach jolted; he was still not entirely certain what he would do if he heard Greyback’s voice amplified and broadcast in that room and around the world. But he steeled himself — if he wanted to kill Greyback one day, he reminded himself, and it wasn’t so much a want, he thought, it sucked at him like a kind of riptide, if he wanted to kill Greyback he would have to face him — and he said, “Sure, I’d love to.” 

A woman called in from Liverpool wanting to know more about attending Hogwarts as a werewolf and a couple phoned in from Brussels with questions about the Wolfsbane potion and the leader of a lycanthropic community organization in Rhode Island called up, asking Remus what he thought about how wizards could be effective allies to what he called “part-human self-determination,” and at 9:40 when Amelia said, “We can take one final caller,” Remus was feeling almost floaty-certain he was home free until he looked into the mixing room where Lisl was reading the disclaimer over the phone and saw the face she made. Amelia’s lips were pursed white when Remus turned to her. _Ready_? she mouthed. 

Remus nodded — the voice split the room, split the world. “Lupin,” said Greyback. 

He willed his own voice steady. “Hullo.” 

“I will admit it’s uncanny after all our face-to-face conversations to hear your actual political leanings from your mouth in your same voice.” 

When Greyback had reached in his mouth and felt how sharp his teeth were, and he said, _you’ve never tasted blood,_ and he mourned it; he mourned whatever scrap of humanity Remus had left to him, but he knew Remus himself did not. Even in memory the sudden taste in Remus’s mouth was like bile or motor oil or something worse… 

“I rather don’t know how any of dear Amelia’s listeners can buy into a word you say when you were sent by the Ministry as a spy into your own master’s pack in ’78. How gruesomely you lied to all of us and to yourself — to your true nature; I mourn it, Remus, I mourn it dearly, that I did not take you with me on the night we met…” 

Amelia’s hand hovered over the _disconnect_ button on the board that would hang up Greyback’s call. She met Remus’s eyes for just a moment and she gestured but he shook his head. 

“I thought perhaps twelve years in prison would have disrupted wizarding civilization’s vise grip on you but I suppose I have been known to be wrong. You — sipping Wolfsbane, a tame werewolf, under Dumbledore’s watchful eye — you cannot speak for our cause. You have forgotten where you came from. But it has not forgotten you.” 

“I haven’t forgotten,” Remus said, “I can’t forget. I do remember — it’s never left me — how much you relish chaos, blood, at any cost, and I know — you were in it for blood in ’78 and you’re in it for blood now. You would see all of us dead before — ”

“Better that we die than live as slaves to the Ministry. Better that we die than live as sacrificial lambs, dogs, animal testing subjects for humans who do not understand what we are capable of.” 

“We will be Voldemort’s dogs and he’ll cull us all when it’s over. You know that — in the seventies he refused to give you the Mark — ”

“He knows who we are,” Greyback said, voice a hoarse, measured whisper. “And he knows how we have suffered — how we have been underestimated, by the same hands. Better than you do, now, Remus Lupin.” 

Amelia’s interjection seemed to come from far away. “Now — ”

“I do not belong to him. That is what he offers us. Allegiance without enslavement. We do not — we will not — belong to him. But you, Remus, as much as you may strive to deny it, you belong to me. We will see it come to its fruition before the — ” 

Dialtone like a long mechanized scream. “That’s another — another buzzword,” said Amelia, putting her jovial radio voice back on. “We are not possessions of those who turned us.” 

“We’re not,” Remus said, shaky, not really believing it. “No, we’re not.” 

Amelia signed off and put on the required PSAs and she and Remus filed out into the mixing room as the next show’s panel filed into the studio. Lisl had the headphones back on, lost in focus, and Amelia pressed the metallic ring of a squashed beer can into Remus’s hands, which were shaking, and his knees, and his ears were ringing, or it was the refracting echo of the broadcast, or the magic, or the dialtone… “Your Portkey home,” said Amelia. “Did you really spy on his pack for the Ministry?” 

He couldn’t hold the shaking out of his voice any longer. “Well, for — for Dumbledore, not the Ministry.” 

Even as he said it he knew there was really no difference. The warmth in her eyes had diffused and changed and suddenly, impossibly, her teeth seemed sharper. “Right,” he said, “take care of yourself. You’re very — ”

Whatever he was very disappeared when the room did. It dropped him in the kitchen of the cottage on Eynhallow, in the warm room lit by the gaslamps and the fire, and Sirius was halfway to his feet and the sound seemed to shift — the radio played the PSA Amelia had cued up before Remus’s departure. His heart was in his mouth tasting like bile and Greyback’s voice — his words — echoed still in his mind and Sirius’s look was like sympathy or shock but also like fear and he flinched at the sight of it. 

Fear, it was, fear that Remus would leave; he realized, fear he would take it all, and run. His heart — his animal’s heart — dry-ice shattering. What was this thing, this power Greyback had, to break everything, every single possession of Remus’s he had ever touched? 

“Want to sit,” Sirius was saying, “sit down, come sit.” He found he couldn’t. His knees knocked together. This, he realized, with a bite of clarity, probably constituted one’s flight response. “Want a glass of water?” 

“No, no,” he said. Something — a scream (or, God, a howl) — behind his teeth charcoal black and shoving up his throat. Instead of it he said, “Every minute Sirius I swear every second I know he still draws breath it’s like — it eats the life out of me.” 

“I know,” Sirius said, “I can’t imagine, come sit — ” 

“I can’t, I can’t.” Outside it was raining. The screaming eternity of wind. “I have to, I have to kill him, I have to. I have to soon or I’m going to — I don’t even know. It’s going to just wash me away.” 

“I know,” Sirius said, gently, “I know. I want — I wish he were dead too.” 

“Not as much, not half as fucking much as me.” 

“I — yes. Not as much as you.” 

In Guern — Greyback had known every fucking inch of it and he had relished while he could the things he could make Remus say and do that were lies or performances until he could not himself tell when they were lies or performances. The self he put on that he still felt he sometimes couldn't shake; the rabid desirous self, who looked for the way out of every room, and for blood, and for his master’s wishes. Its very existence seemed to prove there was an animal piece to his mind beyond his body. A self that under duress could quickly eclipse the other. This and this alone was the survivalist to him. 

He had lived, because he had had to, because he had forced himself, and because he could, because of that thing, which had been put there on the dusk moor in ’65, and which had been tested again and again by the same — by the creature, who had known — who had turned his mind against itself and against Sirius and against his own humanity — 

“He set it up, he built everything up, Sirius, and Peter just fucking played it,” Remus said, and his voice seemed to echo in the tiny room, “and he’ll have that — that same fucking stranglehold on me until the very day one of us — ”

“Remus,” said Sirius, and his voice sounded very far away, but somehow through the vortex he touched Remus’s shoulder, and Remus shut his eyes. 

Outside he knew without seeing there was only a sliver left of the moon but he wanted to kneel in the grass and rage to it. Instead he let Sirius embrace him. Something caught like a key in a lock. He felt like he could weep but he did not; instead Sirius kissed him. It was a chaste kiss closed-mouthed and saying, I forgive you, I forgive you by proxy for everything, I absolve you, your every sin… He kissed Sirius back, to taste it again, hungry for it, and Sirius’s embrace changed, just so; he always knew, God, had always known, what Remus needed; he had always been trying to know, and for very many years Remus had built his every single sharp edge up to keep him out, because he had refused to believe it were true. 

It was necessary now as almost always to forget. To forget to whom he belonged and what had been said and what had happened, God, everything that had happened, since the beginning of it, and to forget that so much of it had been for nothing, had been only for pain, only for death — and it was necessary also to remember that kindness was something he deserved, something he could feel and of which he was capable, and to remember that of all the ways he had ever betrayed himself this was not one. Loving Sirius and loving magic and because of it all trying so very very hard to be real, and to be good, and to be wanted, and to be human — there had to have been more that came of it all, all that fucking work, it had to be more than this, more than the black void living in his mind, more than the tea-leaf dregs of residual distrust, more than madness more than suffering more than the wall they had built up between each other out of of guilt and fear — 

Together they went into the bedroom, and undressed each other, and Sirius lit the pale gaslamp at the bedside and Remus didn’t care. Sirius was already half-erect from their kissing and the chiaroscuro shadow of his chest and belly and his hair which he had taken down and his thunderstorm eyes — all of it made Remus’s mouth dry up. “You’re so,” he said, reaching for Sirius, and again, impossibly, he thought he might weep, “you’re so — my God.” 

Long ago Sirius might’ve made a smart remark at that, ah, Moony, who would’ve thought, you of all people, you know, can’t you use your words? But he did not. They touched, kissing, eyes just open, watching what they were doing to one another, remembering, re-memorizing, until at last Remus could hardly stand it, “I need,” he said, bending his knees, shifting his feet up the bed as if to show Sirius, shamelessly, what he wanted, where he wanted, “Sirius, I need — ”

He thought their speech was a sort of separate function of their bodies and as such Sirius of course could already tell. By ’78 Sirius hadn’t needed a wand for the spell so often did he cast it but now he did not even need to say it aloud. Remus had forgotten how it felt, the spreading pulse of warmth, the attendant rush of anticipation low in his gut, and he was aware of himself almost desperately, his blood, his consciousness there, his emptiness… Sirius ran two fingers over him and Remus could hear him swallow, but then he nuzzled Remus’s cock where it lay soft against his thigh. 

“Don’t bother with it, Sirius,” he said. 

“It’s just — ” 

“Don’t — please don’t bother.” 

Sirius kissed his belly obligingly and sat up and reached for his jeans on the floor and from his wallet in the back pocket he took a string of Muggle condoms in blue foil packaging. 

“What — ”

“Have you never seen a condom before?” Remus shook his head; he had not. “Help me put it on?” 

“You don’t,” Remus started, “you don’t need — ”

“I could get you sick.” 

“I don’t care.” 

Sirius’s eyes darkened just a shade. “You should.” 

He lay on his back in the pillows and Remus knelt beside him and Sirius guided his hands as he rolled the latex ring onto Sirius’s erection. His skin was blood-hot, a desperate dark velvet; familiar weight in Remus’s hand when he wrapped the girth of it and gently squeezed. Sirius gasped and Remus pressed their lips and teeth together passing his thumb just under the sensitive head which was perhaps the first trick he had ever learned to get Sirius particularly hot, and Sirius snuck a hand between his knees and passed the same two fingers through the cleft of him again. Finally, carefully, with just enough heady pressure, one slipped inside him, to Sirius's second knuckle. When Remus pressed back against the sudden welcome shock of it Sirius added a second and crooked them both and something low in Remus’s spine melted shiveringly to golden liquid. 

This was, in the time before, where his mind had chased away and elsewhere, but it did not, could not, he was tethered here, as Sirius worked him open; he was bound to this room, to this present, to this mind, to this body. “Want to,” Sirius said, right against his mouth, vibration of breath, “d’you want to ride me?” 

He nodded — rose up on his shaking knees and straddled Sirius’s lap and Sirius’s hands against his hips and the small of his back were slick with sweat and otherwise. His heart was slamming forward out of his chest and he could feel like an _Imperius_ compulsion, like magnetic north, the soul-deep tugging of Sirius yearning for him, and it was deeper and more pure, he thought, with an abstract triumph, deeper than ever he had yearned from his very blood for the moon or for Greyback — 

He sat deeply and too-quickly and the sound punched out of him was almost enough. What to do with his damn knees… in the pale yellow butter light from the gaslamp he was sure he looked like some ghostly revenant after souls but Sirius looked at him like a priceless artwork discovered in an art thief’s opium flophouse. He allowed himself to think perhaps he was loved — had always been loved — despite his ravaged body, or perhaps for his ravaged body… 

Sirius shoved up and Remus cried out again and Sirius gripped him tightly by the hips with his thumbs in the notches feeling for a heartbeat in the thick vivid blue veins — 

The great sucking black hole felt spinning closed. It wasn’t how it had been before because it was now. He felt full up with it — with the immensity of that feeling which was perhaps love or something else. When he could manage it he shifted until Sirius’s cock pressed up someplace inside him that struck flint to tinder and he felt his jaw fall open and under him Sirius moaned. 

“Remus,” he said, his breath was choppy quick, he sounded seventeen, fucking seventeen years old, in Arcadia behind the mothbitten canopy of their beds in their Hogwarts dorm, Moony can I, please, I’ll be careful, “Remus, I want to, to really fuck you, can I?” 

Yes, he said, yes I will yes; he let Sirius flip them, into the mess of blankets and pillows; and the sound he made when Sirius pulled out might have embarrassed him if he had been thinking straight. 

“God,” Sirius said, “oh, God.” 

“What?” 

“You almost — ” 

He helped Remus ceremoniously onto his side and Remus lifted his top knee to his chest and Sirius kissed the prominent ridge of his hip and pressed back inside. This time slow, and Remus took a fistful of the sheets and twisted it. 

“I almost, I almost what,” he tried. He had never been altogether very good at talking during sex. 

“Nothing,” said Sirius, “nothing, nothing.” 

He thought he knew what it had been anyway. _You were almost gone_. 

Sirius took his time at first and kissed and drug his mouth all over until Remus’s skin felt burning and he pushed his hips back into every deep slow thrust and his tugging had pulled the fitted sheet off the mattress. He did not realize by whatever miracle he had managed to get hard until Sirius crept a hand between his legs and touched him. He had always looked in their youth as though achieving Remus’s sexual ruination was his life’s single greatest accomplishment but now it had a special resonance. 

“Proud of yourself,” Remus asked, with hardly any sound, and Sirius pressed a smiling open-mouthed kiss against his shoulder. A second to the scar inside his neck and a third at his jaw. He could feel Sirius’s heartbeat inside himself. “Are you going to — come on.” 

“Remus — ” 

“You won’t, you can’t break me.” 

Or rather he thought Sirius could, but he wouldn’t mind it. Drive it out, he thought; chase everything out, all the rats and dust, the black ghost of every other touch, every historical possession, by that place and by the darkness and by the other, _et libertas mea._ Long ago they had been obliged to bleed each other of grief like a barber with leeches; this felt necessarily different, but it was still a kind of exorcism. Sirius pet his sweaty hair back from his forehead and the nape of his neck and Remus could feel the calluses on his fingers from writing, ribs expanding, heartbeat, heartbeat… 

At last Sirius snapped his hips, setting into a brisk and percussive tidal rhythm, and Remus felt his own steel-trap body open up and yield, the completeness that was beyond self when Sirius filled him deep, the desperate yearning spreading out from some alien heart when he pulled back again… The black void twisted shut like a drain, and the bedsprings whispered, and outside it was raining, and his own breath sounded like sobbing inside Sirius’s mouth when they kissed messy and wet tasting like sweat or skin or blood — 

He did not think he said it aloud but his body screamed _love you love you love you_ and he felt the wild rush of it inside him like a cup filling up up up until when at breathless heartbeatless last it overflowed he thought he blacked out. It had been a long time. In his — in all his veins and up his spine and in the very back of his mind where the floorboards creaked he felt that thing alight swoop through him like a pulse of sonar and it burned and burned for a long moment and then it extinguished. He felt his back arch into it, around it, and the sound he made echoed in his head — a desperate shout, in an empty cathedral. In another moment he felt Sirius stiffen inside him, around him, his choked-off cry, and at last, at last in the stillness, the skin the warmth the weight beside him and the lips and breath at his neck. 

He did not know how long, did not care; he drifted. He bit back whatever sound shoved out of him when he felt Sirius pull out, and he listened as Sirius pulled the condom off and Vanished it, and then there was another moment, silence hovering heavy and blissful, and his magic felt diffuse around him, and he felt like a clean body without history, like he had at last closed the door on his disordered mind, and then he felt the cool cloth Sirius had brought from the kitchen against his belly and between his legs. He opened his eyes; he had not altogether realized they were closed. “Alright?” Sirius asked. His eyes were big and dark. There was a bite mark shaped like Remus’s mouth on his shoulder and his lips were swollen pink. “Yes,” Remus told him, “Yes, yes.” 

“You came,” Sirius said, “that time.”

He almost laughed. “Yes.” 

Sirius kissed him; he wanted to be devoured. They lay close in the bed, kissing, and Sirius stroked his flank and his back and shoulders, and at last his hand rested spread open and warm and flush against the old bite scar. 

_Do not disturb._

“He doesn’t own you,” Sirius said. 

“Neither do you,” Remus told him, so he would not have to say, _but he does._

“Of course,” said Sirius, “nobody owns you. You’re a wild animal.” 

All the rage had diffused into a sort of certainty. His heartbeat had finally begun to slow. 

“God,” Sirius said, with a kind of quiet awe, “God I love you, Moony.” 

Perhaps indeed he had said it aloud. “I love you too. I loved you the whole time. When I forgot who you were and your name and your face still I loved you.” 

Sirius’s tentative grin split wider. “Who would have thought all it takes is a good fuck to make you into a massive sappy git.” 

“Did you forget I made you that fucking cassette tape in ’78 — ”

“Yes, it started with “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and then — ” 

“Love Equals Building On Fire.” 

“God, you would remember, after every terrible thing, the complete tracklisting.” 

“I suppose you burned it.” 

“No,” Sirius said, “I got fucking wasted and threw it out the window of my uncle’s penthouse in Cowley into the street and watched until someone ran it over.” 

He laughed at all of it, at the complete absurdity, and Sirius kissed his cheek, pressing his sharp nose almost in Remus’s eye.

“I’d make it again,” Remus told him. “I forget how to dub tapes.” 

“Unfortunately I think you’ll find that skill rather obsolete these days.” 

“Fuck,” he said, laughing, “damn it,” and Sirius kissed his cheek again and his eyelid and his nose and forehead tracing one of the old scars. Perhaps there were important things to be discussed but he felt warm all over and tired and the door in his head was still closed and behind it everything was asleep and still. He felt a sudden certainty that if they fell asleep together now they would have the same dreams. 

Sirius got up once more to throw the blankets they had kicked off back up on the bed and turn off the lights in the kitchen and the gaslight on the nighttable, and by the time he climbed back in bed again Remus was almost asleep, and the when or where he was felt inconsequential and almost unfully decided. Before him was an open door to a dream, to the same dream, which was warm and quiet and welcoming, and the wind blew, and they were all there with him, out of history and out of death; he fell into it, headlong and willful, and it held him in its arms and rocked. 


	9. Chapter 9

When the owl came they were fucking again; once they had started it was difficult to stop. Sirius had abandoned what was left of the terramancy and spell history and the conspiracy and all of it in favor of re-memorizing Remus’s old-new body, the smell of him and the taste and the sounds he made, the fact of his bones, his heartbeat, the soft stretches of skin that would goosebump when appropriately touched. He tried to be slow and gentle because it took Remus a while to get hard but the time allotted to them now seemed borrowed and he could feel the current of fear and anger brewing under both their skin — he could taste it sometimes in Remus’s mouth — like a summer thunderstorm. Yet it seemed the two of them were the foremost living masters on fucking-as-exorcism. 

After a few days Sirius was obliged to Apparate to Kirkwall to buy more condoms and while he was in town he bought a second copy of Talk Talk’s _Laughing Stock_ (he royally did not feel like writing to Dumbledore to fetch the original copy from storage at Hogwarts; besides it seemed likely Harry had borrowed it without intent to return) and good bread and fancy chocolate cut jaggedly as if with an axe, and a bottle of expensive gin, and he thought about trying to hunt down some pot, but instead he walked in the streets in the soft mist listening to the music from cars and the laughter from cafes until he sniffed out the wizarding shop, in which he bought more parchment and a runic dictionary and some owl treats; at last, in the cushioned back room the shop owners had reserved for such purposes, he Apparated back to Eynhallow. On the island it was raining harder, and the resonance at the henge flowed in his blood like an animal welcoming him home, and in the cottage it was warm, because he and Remus had lit the woodstove, and it smelled like smoke and sex and rain, and in the big bed amongst a tangle of pillows and blankets Remus lay asleep and softly breathing. In the night before they had cut each other’s hair with magic at the kitchen table and carried out various correspondences and eaten Muggle macaroni and cheese from a box and then gone to bed again. 

He did not think he had ever truly forgotten what sex with Remus had been like but in the dark years the memory had lost a suggestion of its immediacy or primacy or the exact pitch of their laughter. The way it felt sometimes like Remus devoured him, swallowed him up into the warmth of his self — how he held Sirius’s head against his chest, and how starved he was, how possessing, and what he wanted he showed Sirius with his body, and it was like some command from on high. He felt attached to Remus at the mouth and hips and he was sure he again could map every inch of Remus blindfolded in a single perfect contour sketch. For a full forty-eight hours they did not bother to put clothes on. 

Sometimes in the darkness after dusk they spoke about the past abstractly, and Remus held him tightly, like he was driftwood or a buoy, and told him about Azkaban: about the Wolfsbane testing and the cold stone, about the years that had evaporated simply through their monotony. In fits and starts he told Sirius about the snowbound farm in Brittany and the resonance in the black woods and the footsteps upon the stairs, the owls that came almost hourly to the garret window, “It felt very much like being appraised for parts,” he said, “all of it, you know, valued for assets; like, this part of me is only a desirable sort of edge for espionage and survival.” In the moonlight blooming back now through the lace curtains when the clouds shifted Remus’s eyes were very clear, and Sirius could feel like its own resonance the way they were present together in the same room, in the same moment, in impossible and desperate compounding of history… “For years and years, sixteen years I guess, I couldn’t fathom there was anything else at the core of myself.” 

“Well, how do you feel now?” 

In the dark Remus looked at him as though it were obvious. “This is as deep down as it goes,” he said. As though his very soul was some very rare dun-grey magical bird of paradise glimpsed once in distant humid jungles and sketched in an explorer’s diaries. As though beyond every lycanthropic metaphor and bigoted assumption made about his heart in the very atomized core of him — the very source code — was a pure and screaming supernova humanity available foremost to Sirius, because he believed in it, because he had been years in the farthest reaches searching for it… “So you did,” Remus went on, “you do know, my whole entire soul.” 

The kiss they shared was warm and slow and silken. He wished he could let Remus walk around in his mind, to show him rather than tell him, you have mine, you’ve seen mine too. Instead they fell asleep, and he woke up in the night to find Remus was holding him so tightly he couldn’t move away. 

When the owl came he had leaned up against the headboard with Remus’s back against his chest, and he had pressed his nose in Remus’s neck where the skin was damp and tacky with sweat, and outside it was raining, and the fog was so thick all the the island’s lively green seemed the only real color in the universe, and he could hear the sea but could not see it. Both their hands moved together slowly on Remus’s cock. 

“You can,” he said. “Sirius.” 

He wouldn’t beg, not with his voice; he never did, he never had. Sirius himself did, of course, all the fucking time. 

“Just another — another minute.” 

He traced the scars and freckles inside Remus’s thigh and the white burst like a planetary storm where the bone had broken through the skin and when he felt Remus’s sigh, the curve of his spine — a signal in its own kind of runic language — he passed the questing fingers deeper. From earlier ministrations Remus was open still and wet, blood-hot there, when Sirius chased a finger around his rim; they both shivered, and Remus’s cock jumped in his hand. He kissed the shoulderblade, the top button of the spine, groped for a condom on the bedside table, and Remus lifted up, not so much inviting as challenging, awaiting; he had grasped Sirius's knee for balance. “God,” Sirius said, “oh, God,” he was so beautiful, and they were both alive, and everything was purged of history, it was at last clean, and this moment was amber; his breath inside him was burning, and Remus’s thighs were shaking just enough he could feel it as in his own body, and there was that very fine arch, just in the most delicate secret small of Remus’s back, which did not so much whisper as screamed, _please please please in the name everything sacred please for the love of God have me_ — 

Then there was a rather loud rapping at the window. 

\--

The waterlogged winged cockblock beast was clearly an owl of Hogwarts origin and Remus having wrapped himself in the multicolor afghan blanket was out the door to fetch the parchment and the parcel off its foot before Sirius had completely gathered what was going on. On the threshold between the kitchen and the bedroom Remus read the letter — it was rather short — before he passed it to Sirius in the bed with his face twisted illegibly. It read: 

_Urgently requesting the honor of both your presences at Hogwarts for consultation on a matter of extreme direness. The Portkey carried by this owl will depart for my office at precisely 4:27pm. I trust I will see you shortly. — AD_

Sirius’s heart and entire soul had plummeted in desperate fear, desperate truth; it would have to be something to do Harry, and if it was something to do with Harry likely it was also something to do with Voldemort. Remus checked the clock in the kitchen by the hotplate. “It’s 4:12 now,” he said. His voice was hoarse and soft. 

“I’ll go,” Sirius told him, “you should stay here.” 

“He said both our presences.” 

“He also told you not to leave this island unless your life was in danger.” 

“I want to come,” Remus said. “You know — you can feel what it is, right?” 

Indeed he could. It was a swarming black omnipresent sleeping dread not unlike a Dementor. Out back they took a frigid cold shower together and dressed in silence and dried their hair with magic and Remus chewed his nails. The Portkey when Sirius unwrapped it from its brown paper bag at 4:25 was a chipped pink coffee mug emblazoned with cartoon flowers and colorful text: _World’s Best Grandma!_ Remus hooked his finger in the handhold; in the bed of his ragged nail a round globe of blood was blooming where he had torn the skin. “It’s a shame none of us has any horrible wounds,” he said. “You should try to act as disgusted as you can by me.” 

They both smiled a little to cover up their fear. “Alright,” Sirius said. He wasn’t sure how he could after all he had been doing with Remus in the past few days — all the hickeys and bite marks like constellations of warmth under his shirt (one, memorably, inside his thigh); his mouth tasted like Remus’s mouth, because he had not had time to brush his teeth; something in him abstract and frustrated still yearned and yearned, but perhaps that thing was always there. 

“I wonder how I would act if I had attempted a neolithic spell series on myself,” Remus went on; he was nervous, it showed just behind his voice. 

“I don’t know,” Sirius told him, “I don’t want to know.” 

“Probably kind of lost in time,” he said, but then he looked away. No doubt he often felt lost in time without it. “It’ll be easier. This time.” Unsaid: because we will be together — back in the same breath, on the same page. Sirius squeezed Remus’s narrow hand, and the Portkey snatched them. 

The mug shattered as the vase had in June on the flagstones before the hearth in Dumbledore’s office, and from behind his desk the old man Vanished the shards almost before they hit the floor. The face that had turned to them from one of the chintz armchairs belonged to none other than Harry Potter who looked rather pale and wan but otherwise in one piece and very much like he was trying to keep himself from crying or running to Sirius for a hug. Next to him Sirius heard Remus swallow. “Gentlemen,” said Dumbledore, careful of his voice, treading lightly around the necessary words. “I was just discussing — talking with Mr. Potter, about the events of the last 48 hours…” 

Sirius went to Harry’s side and sat but Remus sort of hovered. Harry was looking at him, out of the corner of his eye, in a way he probably thought was surreptitious. Dumbledore conjured a third armchair forth with his wand but he had to ask before Remus sat in it, which he did very slowly, as though it would bite him. 

“You look very much better Remus than when last I saw you,” Dumbledore said, appraisingly, and Remus looked up toward the ceiling and the portraits; they moved away like skittish horses. His hands were clasped tightly in his lap (the beds of the nails still bleeding) and the sleeves of his carpet coat were cuffed at different lengths and Sirius saw Harry trying to make out the top curve of his Stonehenge tattoo where it cut across a weave of very old clawmark scars. Like he had stuck his arm in a Muggle garbage disposal, Sirius had thought after nearly doing just that to himself in the Chalk Farm flat. The last time Harry had seen Remus was during his botched interrogation of Peter and resulting transformation, Sirius remembered; likely the sight of him with a bit more of his wits about him and his hair freshly cut and his clothing not stolen out of a dumpster (in fact most of it belonged to Sirius) was a bit jarring. But of course this was not the matter most pressingly at hand. 

“What happened?” Sirius asked. “We can small-talk later.” 

Dumbledore furrowed his brow disapprovingly, as though anytime were a good time for small talk, but at last he passed Sirius a bit of parchment over the desk: 

_Charming attempt old man  
_ _We're back at it  
_ _Resistance is futile.  
_ _We will see each other rather sooner than you think_. 

It was signed with the Dark Mark, and the handwriting was horribly familiar. He passed the parchment to Harry who passed it to Remus without looking at it. “When did my cousin write this?” he asked Dumbledore. 

“It was found pinned to the corpse of a student on the grounds this morning.” 

It was a kind of blunt knife-blow delivered in Dumbledore’s characteristic emotionless rendering, as if he were reading it all out of a history textbook. It was Remus who at last asked into the ringing and impossible silence, “So she — ”

“This is the first I’d heard of it, which is itself disconcerting, but it does appear, yes, she has fled Azkaban. Emboldened, it appears — ”

“Shut it,” said Sirius, surprising himself. “What student? How did this happen?” 

He had not realized he was shouting until he heard his voice echo back at him. Remus was looking at him out of the corner of his eyes, and Harry was intently studying his sneakers, which were grass-stained. 

“Cedric Diggory,” said Dumbledore flatly. “The other Hogwarts champion in the Triwizard Tournament. His father is with the body now down in Sanderson’s classroom.” 

“What killed him?” 

“What do you think, Remus.” 

In the interim years the _Prophet_ had reported successful murders by _Avada Kedavra_ , of which there were few, and connected reliably to those under investigation for Dark matters including the smuggling of magical creatures, potions ingredients, and house-elves, or to domestic squabbles among mad (and certainly inbred) pure-blood families. In America they were having trouble regulating the spell due to their devotion to an obscure clause of their magical constitution that classified the Unforgivable Curses as unalienable rights to be used with “thoughtful sparing.” But there had not been much talk of it in the UK outside the tabloids which was just as well, because the sight of the words — the very thought of the spell — gave Sirius a visceral nauseous reaction after his years in the Auror department. “How did they,” Remus was asking Dumbledore; his shock scrambled his words. “Why?” 

“It was a sort of — very much under-the-table preparation for the first task which takes place in three weeks. Harry was invited to observe the preparations, against all tournament rules, mind you, and asked Cedric to come along with a mind for fairness. The champions were meant to grab a golden egg from a dragon’s nest. Of course one of them was a Portkey…” 

“Cedric wanted to pick it up to — to test the weight of it,” said Harry. His voice sounded like he had only recently managed to stop weeping. Sirius reached for his narrow trembling shoulder and squeezed it, trying to transmit strength, or will to go on. “It was the egg from, from the clutch I was supposed to be allotted.” 

“Diggory disappeared and Harry and the dragon handlers immediately reported the disappearance to me — of course the Portkey was untraceable. I began to feel rather certain about who was responsible for the switch when I sought out Karkaroff and he had disappeared.” 

“The Mark,” said Remus. 

“Yes, I contacted Severus, who confirmed as such; Voldemort’s followers were summoned to a graveyard outside of Manchester. Certainly they had intended to have Harry rather than Cedric which makes it seem likely to me they were going to attempt this spell series…” 

He passed a book over the desk to Sirius which likely had been procured from the Hogwarts library’s Restricted Section; the pages were stained with potion and stung Sirius’s fingers and where some books’ parchment was gilded in gold or silver this was gilded blood-red. In knifelike letters the page was titled _Creocorpus Spell Series_. 

Sirius read on: _Creocorpus strengthens or embodies a non- or partially-corporeal entity. Performance at a resonant location strongly recommended. This spell series requires three specialized and case-specific ingredients as delineated in the seminal potions text_ Necromantyc Elyxyrs: 

_Bone of the father  
_ _Flesh of the servant  
_ _Blood of the enemy —_

“The more mortal the enemy the stronger the spell and more reliable the results,” Dumbledore said. “So certainly Sirius while you or I or any surviving members of the Order may suffice as enough of an enemy to reinstate Voldemort to a body his Death Eaters will of course be after the only enemy who has only ever dealt their master a truly wounding blow, which means they are after Harry. Voldemort could not perform the spell series with Cedric but he is prepared, and he has gathered those most loyal to him again, and it seems they will do whatever is necessary to restore their master to a physical form.” 

“Do we know who placed the Portkey?” Sirius asked. 

“Certainly someone employed at Hogwarts; I am doing my best to suss out — ”

“And how, how could he have called all his followers to him,” Remus asked, “if he has no body?” 

Silence rang, like a Muggle telephone. Remus passed Bellatrix’s parchment up onto the desk, and before Dumbledore could take it back Sirius grabbed it again and silently with magic wiped the sheet clean of Remus’s fingerprints. Dumbledore’s eyes glittered at him, like an oilslick or like the scales of a dead fish in a supermarket case, but he said nothing. 

“Where’s,” Remus said, very gently, “where’s Pettigrew?” 

Even Harry looked up at that with his Lilyish eyes huge behind his glasses. 

“He was never sent to Azkaban,” said Dumbledore at last, removing his pince-nez; “we thought it most prudent to keep as best we could from Voldemort and his followers that one of his most valuable spies was in our custody. He was kept at the Ministry in the basement holding cells, Remus, you may remember… Anyway about three weeks ago his jailers reported to me his escape.” 

Lucius Malfoy, Sirius remembered, was at the Ministry, and it was very likely according to all of Draco’s ceaseless bragging that he was high enough up in their confidence to have, or to have paid for, full access codes. 

“Sirius handed him to you,” Remus said, “on a silver fucking platter. The man responsible for, for the deaths of Harry’s parents… for — I could list them, Albus, if you want… it seems to me altogether very likely he sold out more of the Order than just the Potters over the years.” 

“I had, Remus, requested his incarceration at Hogwarts but the proposal didn’t pass through the Board of Directors…”

“Fuck,” said Sirius, “fuck the fucking Board of Directors.” 

“I agree, Sirius; too many of them have Ministry connections and it is becoming clear to me that the organization’s main priority is with silencing and propaganda at this point… they don’t want to admit to what is becoming clear.” 

“That he’s coming back,” Harry said. 

“Yes, yes, it would be a disaster for the elected positions you see, altogether too many of them ran on peacekeeping sorts of platforms…” 

Remus had perked up at that. “Peacekeeping from what.” 

Dumbledore looked between the two of them — Remus had sat on the edge of his chintz armchair, grim and expectant — and then to Harry, whose eyes were big and bright and met the old man’s, searching. “Ah,” he said. That infernal syllable. “Perhaps it is best — ” 

“He should hear this,” Sirius said, “whatever you’ve got to say.” 

“Not at this juncture, maybe,” the old man went on, “Harry, would you mind — awaiting us just outside the door, just for a moment.” 

Sirius for one knew as a fact Harry and Ron and Hermione had a seemingly limitless supply of Extendable Ears (they came in packs of two but Hermione would perform _geminio_ on one to give them a set of three) and as such he probably didn’t mind much being kicked out. He likely had an Extendable Ear in his pocket at present, and it was also likely Ron and Hermione were waiting outside the door under the Invisibility Cloak with the other two already under the door. Still Harry put up a good show, the way James would’ve — “I think, sir, this is all, I mean, pretty relevant — ”

“I know it seems that way, Harry, but the political end of it is rather less so.” He smiled with a sincerity Sirius hadn’t seen from him in decades. “We will go over a few particulars and then I trust we will need more input from you. Besides you look a bet peckish — I’m sure the house-elves in the kitchens would be glad to pull something together for you — ” 

As the old man walked Harry to the door with a staying hand between his shoulderblades Sirius met Remus’s eyes for as long as he dared. _We cannot let him get between us again_ , he was trying to say, and Remus nodded, but perhaps he had read something different. His lips were pursed so tightly they were bloodless white, and in the resonant cavern-space inside his eyes something vengeful circled like sharks after blood. He wanted answers for thirteen years’ questions directly from the horse’s mouth and Sirius couldn’t blame him. 

The door closed behind Harry, Dumbledore sat again at last, careful with his old bones, and his chair creaked, and he folded his hands thoughtfully upon Bellatrix’s sheet of parchment. “Gentlemen, where were we?” 

“Peacekeeping from what, I’d asked you,” Remus said. 

“Ah, yes. I can see that I — I do believe I owe you both a bit of an explanation.” 

Remus bit his lip. Sirius could almost feel his heartbeat. 

“After your arrest Remus an opportunity was presented to me. Many of us in the Ministry and the Wizengamot and at Hogwarts understood that Voldemort was not truly dead. We figured based on historical precedent we had perhaps two decades before his return and we figured that his attempt at recorporation and his second campaign for domination of British wizardkind would involve in some way Harry Potter, given Sybil’s prophesy and the events of Halloween 1981. Several Ministry researchers had been studying since the advent of the worst times what exactly had allowed Voldemort to gain a foothold in the first place and one of their key findings was the — shall we say, the variation, the widespreadness geographically and otherwise, the… _diversity_ and tribalism amongst the British wizarding community. They had presented a paper in the summer of 1981 that I, among several other members of the Wizengamot at the time, found very compelling. The central argument was that a more homogenous and insular wizarding community would be more tight-knit and thus easily defensible against any Dark movement, namely, of course, that of Voldemort and his Death Eaters — similar to the argument posited in the Middle Ages leading to the adoption of the International Statute of Secrecy, which saved likely many thousands of lives.” 

“Further development in this vein,” Dumbledore went on, “was considered after Severus Snape’s defection, also in the summer of 1981. He had been working among other tasks on a series of potions, under Voldemort’s direct orders, that would allow werewolves to keep enough consciousness on the full moon to target individuals in particular. Inspired of course by Greyback’s predilection to position himself near those whom it might be politically advantageous to convert. Consciousness on the full moon, I realized, could be marketed to werewolves like you, Remus, whose central — disappointment, or challenge, with your condition is the loss of control. Severus was confident that with enough staffing and trial time he could develop what we called assimilationist potions for many part-human groups, and through this methodology, we realized, we could potentially bring many part-humans under more realistic Ministry auspices. But we were looking at the work you were doing with many part-human contingents and the… relative lack of success you were experiencing, and we were uncertain how to make assimilationist potions attractive — or even appropriately visible as an option. I was about to consult your advice on the subject, the week before Halloween of 1981, and then of course I was awoken at midnight by my colleague’s head in the Floo telling me — ”

“What colleague?” Sirius asked. 

“You both might know him as Mr. Smith.” 

_Mycroft Holmes and Gandalf the Grey_. 

“Anyway, telling me, of course, about Remus’s presumed betrayal, et cetera. Now is the time, he kept saying. Your arrest, Remus, was the worst thing that had happened to wizarding confidence in the part-human community since Greyback bit the young Baroness Salisbury in the early ‘60s — another turning point, perhaps for discussion another time… Sirius can attest to this; there were murders, there were stakings…” 

Sirius could not, in fact, attest to that; he had known it was happening sort of abstractly, because he read the _Prophet_ , but he had been in one breed of chemical haze or another in his room at the Hotel Rome that whole bloody winter, possessed by too much magic and then too little, haunted by his hallucinations and his dreams, which sometimes seemed like they were one and the same. He opened his mouth to protest but Dumbledore went on: “The MLE refused to investigate these cases in any depth even when pressed by part-human community leaders and eventually we were able to offer these communities options in support of what we were calling the Insularity Initiative — they could agree to take part in assimilationist projects including potions testing in order to become part of wizarding society or they could establish themselves as a separate community, who could not receive any sorts of benefits from the Ministry, and who we would consider an enemy combatant during times of war.” 

He waited, eerily calm, for them to absorb it all. When Remus finally spoke his voice seemed shattering. “Every other band I visited in the early eighties depended on Ministry subsidies — ”

“Yes, I know that, it was rather a sort of choice at gunpoint, but you must understand we were desperate, and we were coming off the years of the war; any of us would have done anything, anything in our power to prevent it from happening again — for the greater good, you must understand.” 

“And what about the testing?” Sirius asked. 

Dumbledore’s expression suggested he knew Sirius understood more on this front than he was letting on. “Some of it was successful and some was not. I will not deny there were casualties. But again — Sirius, Remus, I know you both understand what we felt was at stake; you both lived it. It was for the greater good.” 

It rang and rang like a bell in the silent room and Sirius was left wondering, in the tinnitus wake of it, how much else Dumbledore had excused in the name of the greater good. “What, then,” he asked at last, noting in his peripheral that Remus had pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, spine in a sculptural curve, dearly overwhelmed, “what’s happening now? Now that he’s — ” 

He could not — would not — say it, though he knew it to be true, _he’s ready for a body again_. 

“We had rather less time than we thought we would,” Dumbledore said. He was studying Remus though Remus wouldn’t look at him and something about it to Sirius felt voyeuristic and almost clinical. He wanted, as ever, to stand, and to sweep all the trinkets off the desk and onto the floor. To shout in the old man’s face, _you will not take him from me again_. But Dumbledore could not know they had unravelled all the truth from its gruesome and dripping gillyweed knot, nor could he know it seemed they were nearly back where they had been in all the time before, before the war, before Brittany — before he found Remus’s potions trial brochure — before even that long hot summer heralding in so many ways the very living end of it, a whole summer ending with _shantih, shantih, shantih_ … “We thought we had,” Dumbledore went on, “another half-decade, perhaps, to perfect the potions, to facilitate assimilation… now we can do only what we must. The Wolfsbane potion, as I was telling you, Remus, is ready for wholesale and distribution among werewolf communities who have agreed to take part in the Insularity Initiative. Elsewhere the project must be abandoned… we never really did, for example, find altogether a very good way to keep Kelpies from seducing young men…” 

“What happens where the project’s abandoned,” said Remus. His voice was muffled and shallow. 

“Not dissimilar options I’m afraid to last time. We’ll have to identify somebody to liaise on behalf of the Ministry. Attempt to convince these populations to align with us against the Dark Lord once more.” 

“But — ”

“Yes. As you may have assumed our initial forays into this breed of liaison have been… fraught, to say the very least.” Remus was holding himself so still, so very still, and Sirius ached just to touch his shoulder or his knee. To take some of it from him, the horror or the anger or whatever else, to leach it out like poison, to bear at least a measure of the weight. “We were at a, a moment of transition, shall we say, in the Initiative, and — this is what I meant by peacekeeping, Remus — several part-human communities or factions in particular were dissatisfied by what appeared to them — their limited understanding of the full project at hand. Mostly, I will note, the young, who don’t recall with much clarity the days of the last war.” 

“You had to have foreseen — ”

“We did, Sirius; we foresaw, and we figured, what’s a few radicals now at the cost of full assimilation later?” 

“Radicals,” Remus said. 

“Yes, radicals; I’m sure you’ve listened to Amelia Nguyen’s radio program and can rattle off some theses direct from the better manifestoes.” 

Sirius’s stomach dropped; if Dumbledore knew about the show, perhaps he had listened to it. He was smiling placidly, waiting for Remus to lift his head, which at last he did; his eyes were huge and red with pressure and set against dark purple rings like bruises but he would not weep. He searched the old man’s face with a kind of exhausted incredulity and at last he just said, “Right.” 

“They worship you, Remus, like a sort of martyred deity; if Lupin can escape Azkaban, so we can escape these chains…” The almost-smile that played about the thin lips inside the beard was enough to turn Sirius’s stomach. “Alas I do not doubt most of them will align with Voldemort.” 

“Is that not what you foresaw,” Remus said, like tender steps along a precipice slick with ice. “Abandoning them all, to him, for his purposes, when you know — ”

“Part-humans make up an estimated 6% of the magic-bearing British population,” Dumbledore said. “For the greater — ”

Without meaning it Sirius was on his feet, and he heard his own voice almost unbidden in his throat like a jolt of ice or lightning altogether too loud, and he felt the woozy rush of magic through him like a flow of molten gold, and he tasted blood, from biting his lip — “Do not — don’t fucking say those words again.” 

The silence was cold and bitter and on the walls about all the portraits had fled. Dumbledore looked up at him with a mild interest indicated by his raised bushy eyebrows; Remus looked askance at Sirius’s knees; he had clasped his hands in his lap so tightly the knuckles were white — he had done this, Sirius recalled inanely, in Defense Against the Dark Arts, in school, when the professor had said something horrible about the Lycanthropic Condition, and Remus had bowed his head, as though he shielded himself from rain, and Sirius would have burned something down for him, even then, and almost did, but he knew if he did it Remus would never forgive him, and this time the never-forgiveness would be for real. It wasn’t so much that he couldn’t defend himself as that he wouldn’t, in service of the secret, in service of the performance. When they fought — in their worst fights, he had wished (twistedly, perversely) he could make Remus angry. He thought for a while it would have proven to him that Remus really loved him. 

“Sit down,” Dumbledore said, “Sirius.” 

“I’m not fucking thirteen years old and I don’t work for you anymore, Albus.” 

“You don’t, eh?” 

“It seems both of us have worked for you,” Remus said; he was still on the ice ledge, and the very precariousness of his balance was in his voice, “perhaps entirely without meaning to, for a very long time.” 

Stillness. Even the bird watched them warily from his perch. 

Perhaps he had had them earmarked — he had seen them as children. When they awaited in an alphabetical line the chance to put the hat on in the Great Hall. From the first moment they had ever seen each other, alike already in the totality to which they had betrayed their respective blood. His magic was like molten glass running through him and he remembered, sudden flash of liquid clarity, in the night in the bed in the cottage on Eynhallow under the pale moon, just days previous, and Remus had been talking about Azkaban in the most depth he had heretofore dared, and he had said, sometimes I wondered if Dumbledore sent Greyback after my father… 

“What do you want, Remus,” Dumbledore said at last. 

“A pardon,” he replied, instantly. “An apology.” 

“You know I can’t — ”

“I know,” said Remus. “You can’t.” 

He was so still and his eyes were a brutal frozen green like sea ice. It seemed what he had learned in the prison first and foremost was stillness. 

“I’ve been in communication with the magical theory department in the wizarding college at Yale,” Dumbledore said, after a moment’s eerie quiet. “There is an opening for research at a resonant site in Detroit, Michigan, studying the sites of since-bulldozed ceremonial structures of the Mound Builder people…” 

He trailed off, as if either of them would dive on it as a verifiable option. “I won’t leave my godson,” Sirius said at last. 

“He’s perfectly safe here — ”

“Clearly not, as you just told us there was a spy at Hogwarts.” Dumbledore cocked an eyebrow, and Sirius realized why exactly they had been brought to Hogwarts to begin with. Not the dead child, nor the revelation. Simply to be asked yet another favor. All he could do to pretend he still had any sort of free will at all was to volunteer before Dumbledore asked for it. “I’d rather stay here and suss out whoever it is,” Sirius said. Already he was thinking he’d bet money it was Sanderson. “Who’s the new Defense professor?” 

“Alastor Moody, believe it or not. The best of the best for times like these.”

“Does he still drink from his — ”

“From his hip flask, yes; especially these days,” Dumbledore told him, eyes twinkling. “Remus, regardless, I have no doubt it would be safest for you to remain on Eynhallow at least for the time being. I’ll put together a portkey for you in just a moment. And Sirius, I’ll give you two weeks to figure out who exactly is the spy in our midst before I begin to undertake the complete and exhaustive spell series that will renege the students’ contracts with the Goblet of Fire and call off the Triwizard Tournament.” 

Remus’s face was steely and his lips pursed tightly, and Sirius knew logically at least part of it was performance; Dumbledore had to be kept thinking Remus was on the verge of attempting the ancient runic lycanthropy cure, otherwise he would certainly find some other use for them both. Yet it still — they had had only a week since Remus had been on Amelia’s show, a week to be together, to leave neither the cottage nor the bed in the incessant rain, a week to go over thirteen years of separate and bloody history. “What about my research,” Sirius asked. 

“Two weeks is all I ask.” 

Remus stood, shifting the legs of the chintz armchair, and he looked at Sirius for just a moment, and something far back in his eyes like some galactic wormhole said, _let it be_. “I’ll take that portkey now,” he said, voice raw. 

Dumbledore rummaged under his desk and pulled up a rumpled two-weeks-old Arts and Culture spread from the _Prophet_ , which he muttered the requisite incantations over and then passed to Remus. “Three minutes to Eynhallow,” he said, as though he were a train conductor announcing the next stop. 

“You know where I’ll be if you need me,” Remus said, to Dumbledore, but also to Sirius. 

“You do look well, Remus; more color in your face, I meant to tell you.” The old man smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. No thanks to you, Sirius thought about saying. “I suppose you haven’t had any sort of correspondence from Greyback.” 

“None — ” Remus had to clear his throat. “None at all.” 

Dumbledore had this way of looking at you to winnow out your lies. To it only Remus, it seemed, had ever been immune. 

“Keep an eye on my notes,” Sirius told him, trying to keep the fondness from his voice. “And let me know if I should send you any food.” After this regardless he planned to go by the kitchens and pack up weeks’ worth of treats he knew Remus had liked in school; coffee and sticky buns and checkerboard cookies, mince pies, roast chicken, fresh bread and soft cheese and spicy salami… 

He realized perhaps their separation was also part of Dumbledore’s grand plan just in the split second before Remus flashed away from him and he dared to meet Sirius’s eyes with a sentiment just short of vocalization, like hundreds of thousands of words all at once, and in it was a thread of hope, strange and bright, like the day on the Margate beach — at the height of his suspicion — he had dared to hold Sirius’s hand. Then he was gone; it felt like an excision, amputation, exorcism, like a support had been carved away, nevermind he himself was supposed to be the whole one. 

Dumbledore was looking up at him from his desk in expectant silence, and Sirius turned and went out the door. Outside by the gargoyle statue he let out most of the breath he’d been holding, and he realized he wasn’t sure where to go; he had no office nor classroom nor quarters anymore, and his head was spinning around all that he had learned, and all that had happened, and his magic felt hot and coarse in his blood, and he missed Remus already desperately like a limb or an organ lost; to think ten days previous they’d been fighting; to think four months previous he’d believed Remus guilty of horrible crimes. To think — an hour previous they had been making love. To think he had initially thought after this they would just go home and get back to it. 

When he felt a gentle pressure like a hand on his arm from nowhere he startled for a second until he realized the obvious. “Fifth floor,” whispered Hermione Granger’s voice, “Room of Requirement.” 

\--

The room had manifest the way it often had for Sirius and James and Remus and Peter whilst they were working on the Marauders’ Map — big soft armchairs and shelves of books set around a crackling fire, coffee and tea laid out on the marble table with assorted snacks and fixings, fresh eagle-feather quills and lovely carven inkwells arranged artfully. Hermione had already gathered a quill and parchment into her lap whilst Ron prepared coffee for each of them to their liking, kneeling upon the shag rug. He had grown it seemed six or eight inches since Sirius had seen him last and Hermione occasionally looked at him askance from under her brow in a way she likely thought was surreptitious and investigative rather than appraising. Harry for his part, slumped low in the fading floral-patterned armchair James had (eerily) always favored, looked rather dazed. “How are you three,” said Sirius inanely, taking a chair for himself and a teacup of coffee when Ron passed it. 

“What was all that about?” 

“We were listening under the door.” 

Tread lightly, reminded the shriveling ghost of his rationality. “Certain things had become clear — ”

“For God’s sake, Sirius,” Harry said, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Just because every other adult we know talks around the issues with us doesn’t mean you have to also.” 

Hermione and Ron looked at each other, and then Hermione squeezed Harry’s shoulder with a friendly hand. The glance she dared in Sirius’s direction was more challenging than apologetic. 

“Well, Professor Dumbledore was part of — it seems like, a very large project. I’m just winnowing through it all now too. He orchestrated this initiative to either assimilate or excise part-humans from the wizarding community in attempt to protect the majority from future Dark factions.” 

“Why can’t they give Lupin a pardon?” Hermione asked. “He’s innocent…” 

“Yes but, well, it’s more complicated than — ”

“What did he mean by _casualties_?” said Harry, though his tone suggested perhaps he already suspected. 

“One question at a time, alright,” he said, and carefully, gently, he answered, mincing his words; all three watched him intently, eyes wet and overlarge like forest creatures in the firelit dimness. He danced as precisely as he could around the particulars of Remus’s situation and their relationship which he referred to sparingly if at all although more than once he saw something seem to click in Hermione’s smart and swiftly reading eyes, and he mentioned the school reflected in the mirrors on the sixth floor, and he tried to weave the moth-eaten tapestry of what he understood of the complete endeavor as best he could so they would understand. When he had finished they were very quiet, and the room echoed with the fire crackling. When he could stand it no longer he started, “So do you all think — ”

“Why would he do that?” Harry asked. “Why would he, to kids?” 

“Did you hear him keep saying, the greater good, the greater good?” Ron asked. 

“Still, though,” Harry said. “Why?” 

He remembered the early morning after the night in the Shack, where he had been so tempted to tell Harry, bad things usually in fact happen to people who don’t deserve it. But Harry’s blatant refusal to believe in a fact so simple seemed to Sirius a very Jamesian strain; he was loath to quash it. “Voldemort is without a doubt the greatest threat wizardkind has faced in the modern era. Having fought him when he was at his most powerful I can say there isn’t much I wouldn’t do to keep it all from happening again.” 

“But you would — how can you explain it away?” 

“I don’t think it should be explained away. They imprisoned an innocent man and set up a whole lot of orchestration to make sure his guilt would be believed enough to excuse — murder, and erasing, deleting, wiping out. And people died. And they’re still dying. It’s evidence of how difficult times make you frightened and suspicious, and they cause people to put their morals and their souls behind them, which absolutely no matter what we cannot allow ourselves to do. There is a way to defeat Voldemort without resorting to his tactics. I know there’s a way but increasingly I think we will have to find it together.” 

“Together?” 

“Yes, all of us, and the professors here, and Remus; I mean all of us, outside of whatever Dumbledore and the Ministry have planned.” 

“All he needs to come back is my blood,” Harry said softly. “How are we supposed to keep him from it?” 

“We need to suss out the spy here at Hogwarts and we need to trust each other. First above all.” He looked at them each in turn, and their young faces were assured and stern, stony and strong and prepared. He had never himself been forced into such consequential surety so young — he often thought he hadn’t had to truly face the world or the real heart of himself until the Incident, in his fifth year — and as such they seemed to him almost superhuman. They were frightened but they were also so very brave. Still he asked them, even knowing what they would say, “Can you help me?” 

\--

The next night in the rounds he had swiftly established he ran into Alastor Moody whom he had not seen since the worst days of the war and who walked with him around the dungeons taking occasional swigs from his hip flask and laughing his moderately horrifying laugh even less than he had when Sirius had had to work with him almost every day in the face of endless and mounting horror. In the interim years, Moody said, he had worked on contract for magic schools around the world as a Defense Consultant against both student radicalism and external dangers and influences. Notably, he had worked at an inner-city school in New York where students dueled one another in the hallways and were heavily recruited by local Muggle gangs in a breach of the Statute of Secrecy that was being studied now by wizarding anthropologists. He had also worked at an infamous academy of magic in Alaska, Mount Redoubt Institute, where Sirius had heard every student was an Animagus who could assume the form of a whale or porpoise. “That’s not true,” Moody said sternly, when Sirius brought it up. “Half of them are bear or wolf Animagi.” He claimed to have also been charged by the American Secretary of Magic himself to consult on defense for American military sites in the Southwestern desert, and he also claimed the Canadians had asked to consult with him on preventing escapees from their Indian residential schools, but both these jobs he had refused on principle. 

“But enough about me,” Moody said at last, “Albus has been telling me about your academic career which I have to admit I was at first loathe to believe.” 

“Yes, well, I’m not sure if and when I’ll teach again. I’ve been source coding a rather interesting and very ancient site and I think I’ve rather gotten a taste for life in the field.” 

“Right, Albus told me about the whole situation, the grant, and your, ah, research partner…” 

Sirius could picture Dumbledore telling Moody all the detailed history over a cup of tea though he had impressed intently upon Sirius and Remus that the whole matter was to be kept absolutely secret. But Moody was not someone you kept a secret from; every time Sirius had done it before he had regretted it fiercely. Moody had a way of winnowing those sorts of things out on account of his rabid and vigilant suspicion. 

“Any breakthroughs?” Moody asked. 

“I don’t know how much you know about resonance theory — ”

“The bare minimum,” he said, daring a quick smile; “I haven’t studied magical theory since Churchill was Prime Minister.” 

“Certainly the prevailing theories and pedagogy have changed a great deal since then but… we’ve been tapping into the spell history and the terramancy — ”

“What is _terramancy_?” 

“Well in literal translation, reading the earth, ie. for items that have been buried, excavated, et cetera. More experienced terramancers apparently can read geologic history but I’ve never tried it. And anyway at our site the spell history is more interesting. All the old runic spellwork from the neolithic days…” 

He had to explain spell history and how it was performed to Moody also. “It’s interesting, because we don’t even know how these runes are pronounced, or if they were pronounced, and they exist on a few artifacts which customarily are devalued both by wizards and Muggles, but based on the rough translations… and besides there’s a sort of feeling. That’s my favorite thing, about this job, you know, it’s just so much quasi-science, or I guess the closest wizards will ever get to science, based almost entirely on feelings — ”

“But what kind of rough translations?” 

“You can’t tell anyone this, alright, Alastor? Especially not Dumbledore.” 

Moody smiled. “You know my favorite kinds of secrets are ones we have to keep from the old man.” 

He figured if the days of the war were eking back up on them all it was best to have Moody in his corner. Probably old Mad-Eye already knew more about the whole situation than Sirius did; he always had. And besides he was the one who had responded to the Lupins’ urgent Floo in 1965, his early days in the Auror department, he had told them, to take the initial report the night Remus was bitten. 

“It seems like they would — I mean, in 3000 BC, they had some sort of cure for lycanthropy.” 

Moody lifted a thoughtful eyebrow. “Are you certain?” 

“Ninety percent. I mean, not much can be absolutely certain with this sort of analysis. But I can’t see what else it would be.” 

“And what does your study partner think? Given his special relationship to the subject at hand.” 

“I think he’s even more certain than me. But it’s important to note — we’re not certain how these spells were performed, or if any of them still work anymore… I’m sure you’ve seen what happens when wizards attempt ancient spell series.” 

Moody laughed his horrible bark. “Yes, either absolutely nothing, instant death, horrible disfigurement, complete self-Oblivation, sudden onset Squibness… and once or twice yes I’ve seen it succeed. But still, this is an impressive finding, Black.” 

“I’m trying to keep it quiet until I figure out what to do with it. But certainly it’s exciting.” 

They walked and spoke a while longer; Moody wanted to know about Sirius’s publications, and how Remus was doing, and how Harry was feeling after the event with Diggory. When it was nearing dawn he walked Sirius up to the rooms where he was staying on the third floor, shook his hand, borrowed the copy of _Contemporary Resonance Theory in Practice_ that Sirius had unearthed from his trunks in the storage dungeon, and disappeared back toward the Defense professor’s wing. Sirius made a cup of tea and had a cigarette sitting at the narrow window and stared at the same page in the Yale Review of Magical Theory (this he had borrowed from the library the evening previous) upon which Laurent Kateb’s paper “Beastly Resonances” started with a historic woodcut of a werewolf attack as depicted by one of the Dutch masters. For all the common imagination of part-human parties as seducers and besiegers and haunting deathly revenants, he was thinking, it seemed they’d been on the receiving end of such actions more often than not. 

He was nodding off to sleep when his owl tapped upon the window looking cold and wet and livid. He bore a letter from Remus on Eynhallow; the distinctive handwriting tight and cramped and smudged with years, bearing a distinctive overuse of semicolons — 

_Safely back here, thinking of you, and thank you for all the food as I have already eaten an entire mince pie; also have tried to dig more into the spell history (I think I’ve figured out the Silcox method?) and I’ve invited Indra Yates out from Coll School this weekend to help me a bit; will report all findings as soon as possible. I hope Harry is alright; have you spoken to Moody? I remember he always knew quite a bit more than he let on back in the day? Perhaps same is true now. I don’t think the old man invites anyone to teach just because of their academic heft (no offense) so there must be some other truth to it?_

_I think I’m alright; I’m putting everything way in the back of my mind; are you alright? Is Harry alright? I got used to being with you at night and now it seems very dark and cold. I will see you very soon; love — RJL_

Sirius folded the parchment up tightly and put it in the breast pocket of his shirt and went to sleep alone in the cold and narrow bed. 

\--

After a week of sleepless nights and nocturnal wanderings in the dungeons to no result Sirius began to suspect something more complex even than his initial theories was afoot. The skeptical part of his mind reminded him he’d never been able to suss out the spy in the Order in the early ‘80s (though he supposed his emotional connection to the whole situation had served like a horse’s blinders) and it also reminded him that he hadn’t undertaken any kind of detective work outside the academic variety since he’d been barred from working for the Ministry just after the war. He consulted Harry and Hermione and Ron’s assistance when possible though Harry seemed rather cold and listless and Ron and Hermione generally concerned. Sirius remembered Dumbledore’s assertion that the first task of the Triwizard Tournament would likely go forward as planned, though they would have to secure safe transport back to whatever remote sanctuary the dragons had come from for the spare one Cedric Diggory was supposed to have fought. 

He corresponded with Remus occasionally in short letters by owl and once or twice was summoned to Dumbledore’s office to report on nothing. The professors were happy to see him but also seemed rather disconcerted as rumors had spread regarding the complete circumstances of his departure and they likely suspected he had been brought in to search for a spy. Only Moody seemed to enjoy making nightly rounds with Sirius, which was vaguely surprising but enjoyable; never before had he had any knowledge that Moody didn’t, and he found, impossibly, he missed lecturing. 

One evening he met with Ron and Harry and Hermione in the Room of Requirement to find them all in a funk, all three staring with their arms crossed into separate corners of the room which was a surefire way to indicate at least two of them had recently fought. “What’s up?” he asked, sitting down in one of the armchairs. 

“Sanderson’s about to have all our heads because he thinks we’re stealing potion supplies,” said Hermione, darting Ron and Harry a frigid look. 

“I keep telling you Hermione we’re not planning anything and besides it was _your idea_ the one previous time we ever made Polyjuice Potion — ” 

“Polyjuice Potion?” 

“Second year in a moment of Malfoy-induced paranoia,” Harry clarified. “Anyway we didn’t find anything and Hermione — ”

“How long has he been harping you all about this,” Sirius asked, standing up. 

“Since — like September; what’s wrong?” 

Sirius practically ran out of the room and down to Sanderson’s stores ignoring the sputtered invective from the man himself at his desk who appeared to be poking at something almost living in a Muggle Petri dish, and quickly set up an Identification Line, which he taught to recognize himself and Sanderson and shake his wand if it was crossed by anyone else. “You’re wasting your time, Black,” Sanderson announced, throwing his cloak dramatically over the wiggling Petri dish. “It’s Potter and his minions for certain.” 

“Right,” said Sirius, “well now we’ll know for sure.” 

He went up to his rooms and didn’t sleep, holding his wand tightly to be sure he would feel any interlocutors; he had so much magic it felt almost electrifying to be holding something that would focus and channel it. Instead he watched the stars slip in the sky above the forest through the window and thought of Remus who was watching the same stars and how very soon if this worked he could go back to Eynhallow to the cottage and the henge and the bed — 

Very nearly he had nodded off when against his chest he felt his wand vibrate. He shot from bed, dizzy, mouth dry, stepped into his shoes and tied them with magic, and he ran to the door and down the hallway and down several flights of stairs until at last he ran directly into something soft and invisible. 

The cloak fell off Harry’s head and before he could put it back on again Sirius saw that he was in his pajamas and that very recently he had been crying. “Alright?” he asked, knowing the answer would be no, and the adrenaline that had struck through him when his wand had vibrated started feeling quite a bit more like fear, because he thought he knew already what Harry might say. 

“I had,” he said, carefully, as though the words bit, “Sirius. I had a dream…”


	10. Chapter 10

Indra arrived on Eynhallow by Portkey on Saturday morning with several bottles of homemade hard cider brewed by her husband in their basement, and two tins of shortbread she had made from scratch, and a fancy camera also belonging to her husband with several rolls of film she said her sister-in-law had doctored to pick up magical signatures. “She’s a conspiracy theorist,” she said, but fondly, “especially after Keith got bitten, she was with him when it happened, and he blames himself, I think, that she’s screwed up or whatever mentally, but I don’t think she is.” 

One of the film canisters did not in fact contain film but in fact contained pot and Indra rolled a joint and they sat at the heelstone smoking and eating cheese toasties spread with chutney or bruschetta. Remus did not remember the last time he had smoked a joint and clearly the tolerance he had developed in school and the years after had gone royally out the window because after two hits he had lost even the presence of mind to let Indra finish it. The resonance felt creeping up on him like vines and for the first time since he had left Azkaban he felt like food tasted good and even the rain when it came as ever blowing sideways felt like a kind of warm submersion. “I think you should take my picture Indra with the special film,” he said, and his voice sounded like six miles away, and Indra laughed; he didn’t remember if he had ever seen her laugh for real before. “I can feel it — all around me, can’t you feel it?” 

“Yes,” she said, “yeah, I can; I love this place, don’t you, it feels belonging.” 

She took his picture and they laughed and Remus went to the cottage to get more food he protected with an Imperturbable Charm which seemed almost visible and they talked together and finally he said, “You married a werewolf.” 

“Yes.” 

“Are your kids — ” 

“One of them is, and the other two aren’t.” 

“What’s that like?” 

“Well I didn’t — until I tried Wolfsbane. We knew it would be safe, Keith and I, to be with the baby, because we would all be — she’s seven years old now. The youngest. So we thought we were good and we wouldn’t transmit it, you know, until she happened. But the other two, they’re ten and twelve. When they were little we had Keith’s sister come over and she’d watch them, but now they can watch themselves. I think our neighbors think we’re apocalypse preppers because we had a bunker put in for the three of us to transform.” 

“But to be with them like and lucid the whole time — ” 

“God, I cried, of course; Daya’s so fucking cute, you know, she’s like a tiny wolflet, and Keith, I could tell it, you know, I could tell it was him in there, recognizing me.” 

“Sirius can turn into a dog,” Remus blurted, stoned, feeling almost like he’d already said it, or thought it so hard she could hear it; “He always said he could tell it was me and I didn’t believe him.” 

“It’s a construct, you know, ninety-nine percent of it, Remus; there’s so much cultural mythology built up for the sole purpose of making wizards and Muggles hate us and making us hate ourselves and each other so we stay relegated to the fringes and thus can be appropriately manipulated. They dangle all the things they say we should want in front of us like a carrot on a stick. And then they wonder why young ones go off and join their masters.” 

It made Remus shiver to think of it. “How can they — ”

Indra broke a piece of shortbread off with a lacquered fingernail. “Not all of them have memories or experiences like ours.” 

“All the stories and the legends…” 

“Yes. Keith’s is like ours — in fact he was bit by one of Greyback’s, during the war. He and his sister worked at the Ministry; they were sent out in the field together and the rest is history. But many of my students, talking to them, they remember it as this transcendent moment, like this beautiful sort of rebirth, and there was no pain — I envy them. It’s like they inherited the condition but none of the trauma. And Daya, because she was born like this, because she has no master, she’s inherited the condition but none of the trauma. When for you and me the condition and the trauma are hand in hand.” 

He hadn’t ever been able to articulate this but had thought about it abstractly in the years in Azkaban — everything cleared from his consciousness but the swarming and screaming cloud of blackness, everything, even the knowledge and the memory of what he was, until the moon cut it, and cut through him, flayed him open, turned him inside-out, and erased his mind. In the dawn he woke on the floor bloody and shaking having shredded his clothes to ribbons and for just a moment before they came back to the door he could conceptualize, in the split-second rationalization / recollection of what he was, that it had been communicated to him and how. The fangs — the breath — the smile at his neck; the mouth the teeth the hand that traced the scar, the wound, he felt it, as though it still were, as though it always were. _Do not disturb_. His stomach turned, and he sat in the window and hugged his knees and shook and shook and he yearned for them to come back to the door and take it away. To eat it like they ate everything and to leave only the general broken record black nothingness to which he was accustomed: _you will never leave this place you will never kill your master you will never kill the rat —_

All of it had been transmitted, as suspicion was a similar contagion. Greyback was never finished with it — he would never be finished until he was dead. 

Did he hate it so much, he wondered, for the first time, simply because it had been given to him by Greyback? Every transformation encapsulated or reenacted what had been done to him that night on the moors and after… 

Indra had grasped his hand and was passing her thumb gently over his knuckles. He hadn’t realized he had drifted so far away. When he looked up her expression of concern seemed blurry but it took him a moment to realize that was because he was crying. “Fuck,” he said, his voice cracked, and with his free hand he pressed the hem of his shirt under his eyes; “sorry, sorry.” 

“It’s my fault; we shouldn’t get too fucking stoned and talk about it after — ” 

“It’s alright; I forgot it could be — like a rabbit hole or something and you just keep going.” He could feel the black hole twisting just open in the back of his mind again like an inverted drain, letting memories through he had just begun to seal away again. “It can be rather like, like Dementors in that regard, I guess,” he said, forcing a smile.

“We should try to dig a bit into the resonance,” Indra proposed. She wanted to help get his mind off it; her voice was soft and gentle in the way he supposed she probably talked to her kids when they were sick. “And maybe later we can — I have a bit of a proposition for you.” 

“What kind of — ” 

“We’ll talk about it later.” She stood, stretching, and the collar of her coat slipped away from the scar on her neck; she wore fewer necklaces than normal and no feathery earrings and against her dark skin the knots of it were very pale. “Shall we go in?” 

They cleaned up from their snack and fetched from inside select and relevant of Sirius’s notes on spell history and Indra laid out a picnic blanket she spelled Imperturbable, cast a similar umbrella over their heads against the worsening rain, and opened two bottles of homemade hard cider. Then they sat together: Indra, rehearsed and academic, in the Yorke Position, Remus crosslegged, head in his hands, and together they dove under. 

In the dark room he could feel her presence with him but could not communicate the way he could with Sirius. The thread of her gold and sameness — like feeling a dream sibling, or feeling the wolf in himself. She pressed deeper and he followed until he could not feel his body; what was left of him, he thought, in the chasm, was a kind of Patronus soul, like the thing he had summoned at the henge in East Scotland under extreme duress at the end of the summer previous. 

If only history everywhere was navigable geographically, he thought. If only it were this easy — and this void of consequences — to regularly shirk one’s physical consciousness. To connect to something larger than any human though running in every single wizard’s veins — every single human’s veins, if more radical theories were to be believed — deeper even than blood. 

He stopped when Indra stopped; he thought they were deeper than he had been alone or with Sirius before, but he couldn’t be sure, because it was warm and featureless, like a womb, and it rocked, like the sea. It was like the sort of neutral-benevolent twin of the fuzzy darkness that had enveloped his mind in Azkaban — that breed had been an endless static loop, nightmare circulation, the same evil thoughts inescapable and manifest, and this was deep and hollow, and beneath him it fell away into history. Eternity of happenings, of contagion and mistakes. Hatred and fear and uncertainty. The mouth which was the teeth which touched his neck his side his shoulder in the attic bed which was the moor which was the night route he took with his parents when yearly they practiced what they would do if the townspeople found out what he was and came upon the house with pitchforks. Which was when he lay in bed with Sirius at night in the Chalk Farm flat and he couldn’t sleep for love and fear which was when he lay in bed with Sirius at night in the cottage on Eynhallow and he couldn’t sleep for love and fear — 

_I can show you the larger if you want to see it_. 

As it had happened before and was happening now again would it happen. He realized most people’s minds were the same broken record. Azkaban had only exacerbated it. After all he had not been far from that condition in the years after Guern possessed by one excruciating obsession and by love and fear and by his certainty — proven over and over and again over — that the human suit he wore twenty-seven nights out of every lunation was just that, and inside he was a creature and a creature which was a monster. But that self-concept was its own infection which he had inherited when he had inherited the other. And all of it was but a symptom of some larger condition that affected every living human with magic blood. But they would never see it for what it was, because they didn’t read history, or they didn’t read it like this; they didn’t see — couldn’t see — the way it breathed and shifted as a living organism. Endless static nightmare loop. People never learned. They sought solutions for the wrong sorts of problems through concepts they thought were inventive but simply had been forgotten. 

Together Remus and Indra listened into the hollowness and heard the spell. Unlanguage decreed. Performance and ritual and the abandoned compulsion. He thought, nonsensically, of Eliot, or Eliot borrowed from Wagner; he had remembered in Azkaban, once in a while, because it had meant almost nothing: _weialala leia / wallala leialala_ … 

Almost nothing, or everything at once; he remembered thinking it must have been important, like a spell, because it sounded like one, and it was the only thing he could remember. Funny the things he had valued when there was nothing else. Like the memory of Sirius in the forest, with a contemplative sort of vanity, picking dirt out from under his nails. 

The words — the sound — not so much words or sound as impressions or fleeting sorts of visions — if he had not known they were something he would not have thought they were anything of consequence. Yet he knew if he let his mind go now it would suck him under. It would break every silver bond on him and send him back changed into the present world if it sent him back at all — 

Who was he now that he didn’t seek to be rid of it anymore? It yearned for him — for the dark matter of his very soul — and yet now it seemed certain the only release from all of this would be death… 

Remus followed Indra when she pulled back up, like for air, like a journeying cetacean; he wished he understood the physics of it all, because it was only his own mind, but it felt so deep, pressure changed, and his ears popped, and the lightness lifted off him; he could not remember if he had been weightless, or if everything had weighed a thousand pounds, but he opened his eyes, and it was raining, and in the mist and fog he could not see the broch nor Mainland across the black sound. 

“Could you feel it?” he asked Indra, uselessly, because her eyes were very dark and wet, and she was breathing hard. 

She nodded, and she pulled Sirius’s notes of parchment close to her and cast a quick spell so that in a blank corner she could write a few sharp and vivid arrowlike runes with ink sourced from her fingernail. “It’s very old,” she said, and her voice was softer than he had ever heard it. “It’s a language that I doubt was ever written. But it can be sort of half-inscribed in Wizarding Futhark, which makes what Sirius recorded in the Silcox Method rather abridged… it’ll include the sort of catalytic functions but not the full content of the ritual.” 

Remus recognized one of the runes Indra had inscribed and started to pronounce it but she clapped a hand over his mouth. “Don’t risk it,” she said. “I didn’t hear them all, besides. I’m going to go under again, do you want to come?” 

He knew it would be a while before he could bear it again; he felt dizzy, though perhaps that was only on account of the pot. “I’ll sit out. But I’ll be here.” 

“Good,” she said, “God, it’s dark, and heavy; just let me — two more dives, okay, and then we both should be done, at least for the day.” 

While she assumed the Yorke Position and went under again Remus watched at the fog and the rain and the sea nursing the hard cider (very bitter, sparkling and yeasty, gold-tasting) and wondering. Twelve years in the clutch of death the creatures that haunted that place and his mind had blurred together everything he could feel into a blunt darkness. Being let loose again on the world everything was blinding in its richness but so detailed he felt sometimes he could see every single insect on every single blade of grass; perhaps that was the root of what he had perceived as his madness. Sensory deprivation followed by overload. He remembered being brought to his knees by his own prodigal memory whilst he wandered on the grey summer highlands. 

\--

Indra came up and sketched more runes and then dove under again and when she emerged it was getting to be dusk and Remus had to help her inside. Her eyes were out of focus and she said her head hurt so she smoked another joint (this time Remus didn’t share) and put a cool cloth over her forehead; Remus gave her the good chair in which she reclined like a rag doll, and made omelets on the hotplate for dinner with salami and peppers and toast on the side. 

“I think I managed to transcribe about half of it,” she said, eyes closed, folding her hands contemplatively over her belly. She had moved the runes to the back of one of Sirius’s pieces of parchment for more room and in her large blackboardish handwriting the text took up half the page. Remus found he only recognized a few of the symbols, and he saw Indra had connected a few to each other with looping lines she’d had to explain to him denoted stresses and pronunciation. A few of the symbols were represented in the spell history Sirius had copied out via Silcox Method, but Indra’s transcription was definitely more robust. “It would’ve been sung,” she said, cracking an eye to watch him read. “You said nothing was buried here?” 

“Nothing in the terramancy.” 

“Odd. But definitely interesting.” She closed the eye again. “Don’t try to say any of it. Likely it won’t even work. But better safe than sorry.” 

“That always fascinated me — that runic magic language was sort of turned off, during the Roman period.” 

“Agent and performance of magical colonialism,” Indra said. “Like pretty much all changes in magical practice designed and carried out primarily to narrow the magical community and make it more exclusive and thus quote-unquote easier to identify and defend. The Latinate Transition was the most massive known spellwork ever undertaken and it barely worked, you know; all over the world we can still study and sometimes use runic magic. In North America the Dene language group — but we can talk about this some other time when my head isn’t about to split down the middle.” 

They ate in silence, Indra holding the cloth to her forehead even as she devoured the omelet and the toast, which Remus had burned a little. “Are there any other kinds of sites like this, that you know of?” Remus asked eventually, when she appeared to have recovered enough to sit up straight in the chair. 

“There must be one on Ghawdex. If we weren’t barred from there I’m sure we would find one. I’ve seen maps and aerial photos and the like; the island is basically one whole resonant site. But they’ll never let werewolves out there as long as things are the way they are.” 

“But there are no others, no places like this?” 

“If there are others they’re being protected fiercely. Or they haven’t been studied enough to show the ancient spell history. But there can’t — things like this don’t come in ones.” 

“Sirius and I thought it was suspicious that Dumbledore sent us out here, of all places. It’s under the jurisdiction of the Oxford magical theory department.” 

“There was just a paper — I’ll try to get it for you. Not so much a paper as it was published in one of the more reputable radicalist pamphlets. Basically condemning the Oxford department for ties to the Ministry.” 

“I’m not surprised anymore by any other sort of wing of this conspiracy.” 

“Yes; neither am I.” She wiped her plate clean with a last crust of her toast, and then she looked up at Remus stonedly from under her brow. Her eyes had lit up; maybe, at last, she was ready to change the subject. But of course she asked, “Sirius can turn into a dog?” 

“Well, yes, he’s unregistered — ”

“So that he could be with you when you transformed?” 

“Yes, but — ” 

He was worried what conclusions she would draw, but instead she stood and started in on cleaning up the dishes. “My sister tried to become an Animagus for me. And Keith’s sister I think tried, but she doesn’t talk about it. It’s so difficult — it’s more commitment than people think. And it’s a lot of magic.” 

“Sirius did it — he’s always been rather a genius. He did it when he was fifteen… so did my two other — my only other friends in school, though one of them is dead now, and the other should be.” 

“I remember you telling me they had you transform in a shack at the edge of the woods.” 

“They did; at first I would wake up, you know, full of splinters.” It was almost funny now how at the time it had seemed like perhaps not the very apex of pain and indignity but certainly second best, but then at the time he had been eleven years old. “I’ve certainly transformed in worse places since then.” 

“Keith and I once transformed together in a DEW Line bunker in rural Quebec. On our honeymoon.” 

“That’s love for you,” Remus said, then he regretted it. 

“Yes,” Indra said, smiling. “I suppose it is.” 

When he and Sirius had lived in London together sometimes they had Apparated to the Forbidden Forest and other times Remus had gone to the supervised transformation cells in the basement of St. Mungo’s and other times they had gone to an abandoned factory owned by a friend of a friend of Sirius’s uncle Alphard in a district constituting mostly warehouses and secretive off-the-books Muggle dance clubs whose location changed every night. They waited together on the floor amidst the rusted-out machinery (they never figured out what had been manufactured there), and finally the moon came in through the gaping holes in the roof, and they woke in the morning in an ecstasy of wreckage; come to think of it it was a wonder neither of them had ever gotten tetanus. One night one of the Muggle clubs had opened up shop just next door so Sirius had locked himself and Remus up in one of the control rooms. That was late in it — it must have been ’81 — and they sat together in the floor amidst a kind of nest of tangled wires; the ceiling was falling in and the room was too small, all of him was racing, his heart and his mind even but a panting non-language animal racing, and his muscles felt jumping, pressing out through his skin, but Sirius embraced him, like to hold him still, and he couldn’t bring himself — even then — to fight it.

He wondered if Indra could see all of that in his face. He didn’t want to speak about it — he didn’t think he could, if he were asked. He never had, because he had never had to. It just was.But she had turned her back to him and started washing dishes. 

Remus was going to offer her the bed to sleep in but she had brought her wizarding tent, which he helped her set up in the yard, and at last when they were finished — sipping at teacups of scotch for a nightcap at the kitchen table — he remembered to ask her, “You said you had a proposition for me.” 

“Ah,” Indra said, suddenly serious. She set the teacup of scotch carefully in its chipped saucer. “I want to kill Greyback and do the ritual. The next time I share a dream with him — the next time I know where he is I’m going to do it. Do you want to come with me?” 

“Yes,” he said, without thinking, almost reflexive, “yes, yes, of course I will.” 

“And if you have a dream — ”

“Yes. I’ll write you; we can do it together.” 

“We’ll have to stalk him, you know.” Her smile was cold and brittle and showed the sharpness of her teeth. “We’ll have to hunt him and if he’s with others — are you sure you want to do it?” 

He had been certain he could do it since December of 1978. He had longed to do it then but it had all been too precariously constructed and in those days he had thought it was his own responsibility to keep it whole. He had always thought he had forced himself through it but now he wondered how much of it had been in fact the work of some external motivator. He was very good at accepting guilt and yet had never been very good at displacing blame and he had learned as such in his years in Azkaban. 

“I’m sure,” he told her. “I want to do it. Last time I had a dream he was in the south of France, in the salt flat district. But Dumbledore said he’s crossed the channel.” 

“Yes,” Indra said, settling back in her chair. “Three children bitten in Cornwall. The Ministry is keeping it very hush-hush which to me — I can’t figure out their rationale. But it was reported in some of the radicalist pamphlets.” 

“In what context?” 

“Those of us who were bitten by him are perhaps the only ones who understand his — I suppose you could say sadism. But others uphold him, being as he is the only werewolf in You Know Who’s confidence.” 

“Christ.” 

“Yes. I’ve tried to tell my students but they can’t wrap their heads around it when there are a thousand other melodramatic photocopied narratives about his power and grace and incorruptibility.” 

“Do you know if Leigh is still with him?” 

“She is, as far as I know.” 

“She’ll be the hardest to — to separate, or distract; she’s his lieutenant, basically.” It gave him a strange but welcome kind of thrill even to entertain this as a serious prospect outside his dreams. To think about it with more nuance than he had in Azkaban or even in Guern when he had tried to conceptualize things in the attic room he could transfigure into a stiletto knife. Slip between the ribs while Greyback slept and twist. Blood blood blood blood upon his hands warm and black like silty mud in that imagining. “Should we take Wolfsbane, do you think, should we be lucid, before?” 

“I’ve been wondering,” Indra said. She took forth from the pocket of her coat (slung over the back of her chair) a pack of cigarettes she tamped against the table to settle the tobacco. “Certainly it might give us an advantage. But I know that even or perhaps especially the wolf in me wants him dead too. And I’m not certain I want to remember it.” 

She summoned a vivid blue flame into her hands and lit two cigarettes one of which she passed across the table to Remus. “I don’t want to remember it either,” he said. “Or more accurately part of me wants to remember it but I don’t know how much I like that part of me.” 

Indra nodded in agreement. “It’s the part of me I don’t want my kids or even my husband to know. I think it’s the part of me that could be like him if it wanted.” He remembered the animal self he had let out in Guern and struggled to cage again. “I trust it,” Indra went on. “I know that I want him dead in all of my self.” 

He could not be sure what the wolf remembered of his human mind. But it would certainly recall the night of his mauling in the forest, as he himself did not. He wondered if it had conceptualized its own vengeance. “Yes,” he said, “yes, so do I.” 

Indra clinked her teacup with his. They did not speak any more on the subject but he sensed — primordial or sisterly in his blood, a goldish flow like Indra’s signature within the resonance — a special kind of covenant made between them. 

\--

In the next day’s digging Indra consigned his help to listen for the second half of the sung incantation. The process was made more difficult by the fact that they could not talk about the runes aloud, and by the fact that Remus had forgotten most of the Wizarding Futhark he had learned sixth year. “Just listen for and write down whatever you can remember,” Indra instructed. She wrote in what she described as “approximate” phonetic English the phrase she had so far transcribed, so that Remus would know where to start, and then together they sat outside at the henge and dove under again. This time he tried not to let the intense self-reflective metaphysics of it all get to him (it helped that only Indra had smoked a joint beforehand) and even when they got deep enough to hear the spellwork he couldn’t feel so much of the crushing suffocation of history pressing down as though he were some archeological diver. 

It was slow going: listening (though really it was more like feeling, or imagining) enough he could memorize a section, emerging to write it down in phonetic English or whatever runes he remembered, briefly communicating with Indra mostly through gestural signals because they could not vocalize the text aloud, and finally submerging again. They dove thrice and took a break for lunch and coffee and then dove again. By three or so in the afternoon Remus thought he had memorized the complete expression but even thinking through the full performance of it in his own mind felt dangerous. And each time he pulled up into the real world it felt more difficult, and he could sense the same was true for Indra as well. 

By Sunday night (Indra made bacon egg and cheese sandwiches on the hotplate and they each ate two, so exhausted and starving were they from the day’s work) they had a full draft transcription. Indra owled in sick to Coll School on Monday and polished the transcription up with a few more dives whilst Remus translated a copy rune-for-rune with one of Sirius’s dictionaries, sitting at the kitchen table with hot chocolate and a joint, and together on Monday evening, over a scraped-together dinner of cheese and crackers, after Indra owled in sick for Tuesday and sent a quick apologetic note to her husband, they reviewed the translation, which they also did not dare to speak aloud: 

_Here sacrosanct souls of clan [variable] without rain nor snow nor sleet nor ice nor sun nor sight. Here alone secret/invisible for the lifting and the tearing asunder of the blooded veil which is the crossing of the threshold. Which is the breaking of the bonds of the master which is the fulfillment of the hunger and the thirst which is the mastership of oneself which is the pinioned bird taking flight again northward. Which is the lifting which is the lifting which is the lifting._

“Checks out with Sirius’s translation of the catalytic runes,” Indra said, observing a sheet of various notes. “D’you think there’s any worth in making a list of the clans who used the spell?” 

“Probably,” Remus said, yawning, “I mean, as there’s little to no recorded werewolf history of the British isles, it’d be worth seeing, you know, who were the families…” 

“We might be able to pick it out with focus,” Indra said, but she caught his yawn on the end of it. “Tomorrow…” 

When she went out to her tent Remus abandoned the dinner dishes on the table and went in the other room to bed; there was still a little light left sticking in a far corner of the sky, and the moon in the window was nearly full; he resolved to ask Indra if she would stay with him to transform, but perhaps she would want to go home to be with Keith and Daya. 

Regardless in the morning he would have to write to Sirius and tell him what they had discovered. He had composed in his mind the first sentence before sleep snatched it from him. 

\--

Tuesday: Indra was obliged to Apparate to Kirkwall for more food, which she prepared for breakfast whilst Remus owled Sirius with a copy of the translated incantation. After they ate they went out together into the mist and took turns diving into the resonance in search of the clan names which were by far more difficult to pick out, as they all seemed layered in one continuous sound. Most were identified by blends of runes signifying the family’s business or community role, or after landscape features Indra said could be local, mythological, or purely imaginary, and none of them Remus recognized from his long-ago Ancient Runes class at Hogwarts. They had lunch in silence, looking through some of Sirius’s books, and then they dove back in again, and they were down there, deep in the darkness and listening to the sound of it like the sea ebbing and flowing with eons when Remus felt something tug at him. 

At first he thought it was that place or that time; perhaps at last it had grown prehensile thumbs. When he had shrunk back from it enough it didn’t overwhelm his mind he realized the tugging in fact was the signal denoting the breaking of the wards he and Sirius had put around the island weeks previous. 

His wild heart-slamming break for the surface was like a diver’s with a cut air line but it was not fast enough and so he landed for certain back in his conscious body at the exact moment — before he could even process what he was seeing or hearing — he felt the burning dry-ice touch of silver manacles at his wrists. 

Blur of sea and grass and rain and the pinkish smear of human skin. He had been wrestled to his feet and stood under power not his own and he could feel more than see Indra beside him the same, but she was shouting, and her voice was threaded through and hoarse with pain. 

“Let — fucking — you _fucking_ pigs!” 

“Who’s the bitch,” someone asked, voice mocking. 

“She works at the school,” said a second voice, this one closer — too close — and at last Remus’s eyes focused enough to make out it belonged to the aristocratic Ministry man from the Oban Facility’s dock, the night his Patronus had taken him there over a year previous. Mr. Smith, accompanied by what looked like a complete squadron of MLE. “Professor of Magical Theory Indra Bhediya Yates. And our very own Remus Lupin.” 

“You,” said Indra; she spat, and she showed her teeth, “you fucking scum fuck — ” 

Whatever further invective she was about to lay into was cut off by the sealing of a silver collar about her neck. 

“To think we’ve been wondering about the source of radicalist propaganda on the Coll School grounds,” Mr. Smith said, eyeing Indra with a disdain suggesting pure disgust. “I did not know, Professor Yates, when I hired you, that this was the sort of company you kept.” 

When she raised her head her eyes were wet and wide with pain but they were also murderous. 

“Call up Albus Dumbledore,” Remus said, willing his voice sturdy; “he’ll tell you — ” 

“Dumbledore in his fear sees fit to abandon a project I am certain will still bear fruit,” Smith explained. The corner of his mouth curled, pale and grotesque. “Robards, grab those notes for me, would you?” 

Remus’s stomach dropped. So again they had been betrayed — by Dumbledore? Or by the spy at Hogwarts… “You don’t know what you’re doing.” 

“Don’t I?” 

“Are you a scholar of fucking Neolithic spell history?” 

“No,” Smith said. The smile crept ever wider across his face like a shadow or an insect. “But I have one who works for me.” 

“This is worse — Smith. This is worse even than — ”

“Enough. Bryson, the collar, if you will…” 

This, he remembered, had remembered, and the wolf remembered, the vivid bite of it, and he could scarcely breathe, let alone speak, and it was like a shock of lightning. It worse than hurt. 

“Right,” said Smith. “Positions for Apparition.” 

He wanted to say — perhaps he would have, if he could have managed it — you know not what you do; you know not what you even attempt. You know not what can of worms you may very well open in the service of being right. But he supposed perhaps Smith already knew that, and didn’t care. Someone grasped Remus’s arm at the elbow firmly as though he would dare to run, and as they pressed together into space and time toward parts unknown he thought, through all the gathered swarming fog, perhaps, after all of it — perhaps he had at last run out of history. These fragments I have shored against my ruins… 

It spat them out together in the vivid dusk. The dock beneath his feet was wet with salt and the air smelled of darkness and of blood. Set into the cliff was the hole into the earth, the womblike void inside which perhaps he would be unmade. Beside him he heard Indra and her minder crack into presence and Indra’s muffled sounds of protest, but he could not turn his head to look. The resonance that wrapped him now was cold and dark and seethed; it came familiarly for his mind hungry and snatching and heavy as wet clothes. If there were not Dementors yet on this site there would be soon. It bore the preferred atmosphere of hopelessness and fear and pain in which they bred like mushrooms. 

“Come now,” Smith said, gathering his cloak tightly around himself in the sea air. And in the black maw of the underground Remus saw at last as if in mirror reenactment of bygone horrors and betrayals Severus Snape had come to manifest like an Inferi or a memory, somehow imposing despite his unwavering greasiness. The man who had designed and executed — his stomach twisted. _For the greater good_. 

Up toward the mouth of it Smith and the MLE squad led Remus and Indra like sacrificial cattle to the altar. 


	11. Chapter 11

“Are you sure this is a good idea,” Harry asked in the split second before Sirius began banging with a fist on the door to Dumbledore’s chambers. In fact he was not at all certain it was a good idea but could think of no alternative; after all he and Harry alone were by no means equipped to take on the contents of Harry’s dream. 

He was not even yet sure what it was, or that it was real, and he could tell Harry felt the same, but still he tried to no avail to quell the rabid wash of fear. At last after what seemed like hours the old man opened the door, gathering his dressing gown around his surprisingly frilly nightshirt. “For heaven’s sake — do you know what hour — ”

Sirius and Harry pushed past and through the door; the room was darkened, as were the grounds through the impossible window, and at the sound of their voices Fawkes on his perch stirred from sleep. “Harry,” Sirius said, trying to keep his wits about him, “how about you tell Professor Dumbledore what you told me.” 

Harry spared a quick uncertain expression for Sirius before he launched into it directly. “I had a dream sir about — with Voldemort, and — ” 

“Hold on,” Dumbledore interrupted. He lit the candles and lanterns around the room with a wave of his wand, eliciting a chorus of sleepy groans from the sleeping portraits. In the washed-out brightness of the sudden light his face was cold and grave. He sat behind his desk, and Sirius and Harry joined him in the by now familiar chairs. “My apologies, Harry; you were saying…” 

“I had a dream,” Harry started again, slower this time, “with Voldemort.” 

“Another one, eh?” 

“Wait,” Sirius asked, “how long has this been going on?” 

Dumbledore ignored him, and Harry looked apologetically to the floor. “A while,” he said, shyly, “I should’ve — ”

“You can tell Sirius all about it later,” Dumbledore said, voice stern. “Do go on.” 

“In the dream — Voldemort had gathered those who were faithful to him and he was telling them that the spy at Hogwarts had helped set up — the Ministry is going to try an ancient spell series on fifty werewolves. Including Lupin. At their facility in a cave on the Scottish coast.” 

Dumbledore met Sirius’s eyes briefly across the desk. “Harry — ”

“I know this is real,” Harry said; he pressed the heel of his hand into one eye in attempt to hide they had both filled with tears of frustration. “Voldemort said he was certain they would all die or worse. And it would inspire all the part-humans in Britain to fight on the side of the Death Eaters.” 

“It seems very likely to me, Harry, it is a trap to get your blood. And if not your blood than perhaps the blood of other mortal enemies — like myself, perhaps, or Sirius. It is likely any of the teachers here would do.” 

“He didn’t say anything about actually _being_ _there_ ,” Harry announced; very nearly he was shouting. “I didn’t want to — ” He stood, jostling his armchair, and with his hands balled in fists and his eyes vivid green and red on the very edge of losing it he resembled Lily almost eerily. “I didn’t want to tell you because I knew that’s what you would say and Sirius said we had to! But they’ll — can’t we try? Shouldn’t we try? To show them, there are some people who aren’t Voldemort who do care?” 

“He doesn’t care,” Sirius corrected, trying to be gentle, “he pretends he does. He doesn’t care.” 

“Fine, then,” Harry shouted, “fine, to show them that _anyone_ cares.” 

Dumbledore looked between the two of them for a long and excruciating moment and at last he said, “Sirius, perhaps you should get a party together among the staff and faculty — ”

“Can’t you just call off Smith and Snape?” 

Dumbledore leveled at him a piercing look and Sirius realized for the first time in his memory the old man was in over his head — he had lost control. Or he had relinquished it willingly. “I cut ties with Smith,” he said finally, “just last week. It is becoming clear to me the Ministry has completely forfeited their grasp on reality. They will not accept the fact of Voldemort’s return. I instructed him in no uncertain terms to terminate the program. But it seems he has other plans.” 

“What about Snape?” 

“This is Severus’s life’s work. He will not — it has been difficult for him to consider that he must abandon it.” 

“What about,” Harry cut in, “what about the spy?” 

“It had to have been someone who knew about Eynhallow. Who could have leaked that — that we were there, and what it was used for, to, well, probably to Voldemort’s mole in the Ministry.” 

“You think he has a mole in the — ”

“It’s fucking Lucius Malfoy, Albus, obviously. The spy here has been using Polyjuice. Sanderson’s stores have been raided regularly since the beginning of the year.” 

“Only Alastor Moody and Minerva knew anything whatsoever about your whereabouts.” 

And Moody also knew about Eynhallow’s ancient ritual purpose, because Sirius had _fucking told him_. 

“It’s Moody,” Sirius said, standing; “you should take care of him — take away his hip flask. I’ll get a party together…” 

“What the fuck!” Harry shouted. When he got this angry he was really very like Lily, like Lily shouting at James in the Transfiguration corridor the time he had (he thought surreptitiously) sniffed her hair. “What do you want me to do, then!” 

“Harry — ”

“You’ll need to stay here,” Dumbledore said, with a professorly tone that suggested _this is very, very final_. “There is too much that could be lost if you were to — if anything were to go wrong.” 

Harry turned unbelievingly to Sirius, who, for the first time in recent memory, found he agreed with Dumbledore. “I’m sorry,” he said, “Harry, really I am, I really — ” 

“I feel like you all think I — you don’t have to involve me in any of this until you deploy me like the atomic bomb.” 

“That isn’t true,” Dumbledore said, “it’s to keep you — ”

“I don’t need to be kept fucking safe! I need to know what’s going on!” 

It was uncanny to come back around to this place where he had almost been with James in the months before the event. He knew there had been a prophesy but he did not know the contents and James would not tell him his new address because, he said, “It’s a royal fucking shithole, Padfoot, I don’t know how long we’ll even be living here…” 

“I need to get the party together,” Sirius said, hating himself; “it should take them a while to set up for the spell but I don’t know how much more time we have.” 

“Sirius, I thought — ” Harry’s voice sounded like Restricted Section books falling from a shelf — a broken screaming whisper, accusatory above all. “You’re no fucking better than any of the rest of them.” 

“Harry,” Dumbledore said cautiously, and Sirius met Harry’s eyes, which were screaming angry and beyond that devastated, and haunted by fear and trying very hard to be strong, and to fight, and part of it was like looking in a twenty-year-old mirror. I’m sorry, he tried to say, but it made no sound; I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He would have hated himself, had he been in Harry’s shoes. He remembered similarly throwing himself against a brick wall the night he had conspired to give Snape what for. But larger things were at stake — the largest things, he realized, and they walked hand in hand, like shadow twins. 

He turned from both the questioning faces and went out the door. His magic felt like heat lightning. 

\--

In a half hour’s time Sirius had collected Minerva, Pomona, Charity, Aurora, Flitwick, and Hooch in the Great Hall. Aurora had been hosting a late-night star party with Beauxbatons’ Madame Maxime and her more astronomically-inclined students, who heard Sirius’s hushed whispers, were of age, and demanded to come along. They included Beauxbatons’ Veela champion, Fleur Delacour, who disappeared for a moment on their way down into the Great Hall and reappeared with a few of the Aurors (led, Sirius noted, by Kingsley Shacklebolt) who had been dispatched by the Ministry to protect the castle after Diggory’s death. 

“ _En France_ , verevolves and other — _d’etres_ , beings, as you say, they are fully enfranchised, so long as they can understand wizarding law procedure,” Fleur explained with a bragginess that was somehow endearing. Sirius knew that the legal protections extended to French part-humans didn’t necessarily mesh with the cultural zeitgeist, but he couldn’t bring himself to argue with Fleur on the subject at this precise juncture. “My grandmother marched in the streets of Paris to demand recognition of the sort for Veela.” 

Despite the Beauxbatons’ students energetic signing on, it was silently decided that no one would go after the Durmstrang ship still moored in the lake despite Karkaroff’s departure, nor the Hogwarts students, asleep in the dormitories. Sirius conducted a quick head count; the Hogwarts contingent numbered twenty-two. He reminded himself the Order had made forays into known Death Eater strongholds with far fewer — and far less capable — witches and wizards. 

“Alright,” he said, producing the Portkey Flitwick had quickly crafted out of a moth-eaten old Ravenclaw banner. “We’re going to a potions and spell testing facility on the Scottish coast. Try to stun any assailants over wounding or killing them; most of the folks protecting this place are going to be MLE or Ministry employees. We just want to set free the werewolves — most of them will be children and teenagers. If you hear ancient runic language do your best to cast _Protego_ or a Momentary Deafness spell; does everybody know how to perform those?” Nods around the circle. “Any more questions or concerns?” 

“But the moon — ”

“It’s full tomorrow; we’ll be alright. Remember we’re all in this under our own power. If you’re in danger, Apparate back here, deal?” 

Only two of the Beauxbatons students seemed frightened and dropped their edge of the Portkey; Sirius couldn’t blame them. Across the blue velvet banner Pomona met his eyes and smiled — the steely kind of warrior’s smile she had given him when they had together tried to stop this all from happening, before they had even known how deep it went. Sirius sent a quick prayer to nowhere in particular — perhaps into history itself — that they would not be too late. Then space snatched them all. 

\--

They were delivered onto the dock at the Oban Facility amidst shouting and vivid spellfire. Clearly their arrival had been anticipated, though they themselves had also expected defenses. Minerva had called up _Protegus Maximus_ almost directly out of her manifestation (Flitwick quickly called up a second shield to strengthen Minerva’s against the sudden bombardment) and against the great double shell of it the defenders’ shattered hexes and jinxes burst like fireworks. Beyond them was a great black mouth open unto the earth which seemed impossibly to breathe, and the bad resonance of that place seeped out from it like smoke or gas. It was the sort that lurked around Muggle prisons and mental hospitals, around the sites of battles and massacres — a dense cloudy light-sucking blackness that one day soon (if it had not begun to so differentiate already) would take more certain form. As such even without the tangible presence of Dementors the air bore a haunted bone-chill beyond what even was customary to the October coast, and Sirius felt a frozen uncertain thread, a wash of fear, a sense of possibility that already they were too late. 

“Thirty of zem,” Fleur announced, breaking his reverie; she had crouched to count those in the mouth of the great cave. “Two squadrons in the uniform of your MLE.” 

“Right,” Sirius said. The dock wasn’t the best place to have arrived; it was scarcely defensible, and there was nowhere to hide. The fortifications at the mouth of the cave had been constructed specifically to defend against interlocutors from the dock, and if their shields fell they would be defenseless. “Who here knows a Walk on Water charm?” All the Beauxbatons students’ hands shot up. “Okay,” Sirius said, “you all, take three more, and go South — get under the dock, or behind those rocks if you need to. We can shield you until you get into position. You’ll be able to get around their defenses more effectively from another angle. Sound alright?” 

Kingsley and Fleur led the party behind the rocks to the South while Sirius and Flitwick led another group of six around to the North. Minerva and Pomona got the remaining combatants under the dock, and brought down the two large shield spells. 

The Southern party was most effective, dropping several MLE with well-angled Stunning spells before they received a single casualty, whom they fell back to tend to. As they recovered Flitwick cast a clever charm that turned the stone fortifications to momentarily permeable mush, allowing Sirius and Charity to bring down seven more MLE with a stinging net before the defenses were again fortified. “We should try to push closer,” Charity said, “as best we can.” She indicated a rather precarious route forward along the side of the cliff. For a professor who regularly taught entire classes out of Muggle children’s picture books and who wore assorted Vietnam-era anti-war buttons on her every floral cardigan it seemed she had a tough side Sirius hadn’t known about. 

“Burbage is right,” said Aurora, possibly for the first time ever. “There’s a ledge — if one or two of us could get out there without being seen we could drop a blanket stunner, or something else. It situates us better to infiltrate, as well.” 

Sirius and Flitwick cast a shield and a large Disillusionment charm and then ran interference as Aurora and Charity crept out along the ledge toward a rocky overhang. After a while they were invisible even to Sirius and Flitwick amidst the influx of spells, and for a moment Sirius wondered if perhaps something was wrong, until he heard the shouts from the fortifications. The two women had dropped a kind of rolling boulder of magic that swept like a marble in a maze through the defenses. 

Sirius had never seen a spell like that and looked to Flitwick, who shrugged. “Charity was ace in Charms in school,” he said. “In fact she was in the Department at St. Andrews’ for a couple years — but we should probably discuss this later.” 

The remaining MLE had focused a bombardment of hostile spells up toward Charity and Aurora invisible on the ledge (and protected behind the shield held fast by Sirius and Flitwick) but they were quickly countered by an onslaught from Kingsley and Fleur’s party and a scouring wind of magic that swept up from Minerva’s contingent under the dock. Charity dropped another boulder just as a backup troupe of MLE manifest from the cave, and in the sudden chaos Minerva and Pomona and their group burst out from their position, leading the charge with a wave of glowing Patronuses. 

They were joined by Kingsley and Fleur’s group, and quickly by Charity and Aurora, who swept down from their ledge buoyed by a float charm, and Sirius and Flitwick and the rest of their group darted forward, bringing up the rear. Approaching the fray of battle, Sirius saw this new backup squad wore MLE uniforms with a special badge delineating them Ministry Police designated to defend the Ministry building itself as well as any “special projects;” in Sirius’s years in the Auror department they were reliably found Oblivating Muggles around the sites of Death Eater attacks. None of them, it appeared, had much skill for real dueling of the sort the Hogwarts professors (and clearly the Beauxbatons students as well) preferred — when Madame Hooch effortlessly turned one policeman’s Stinging Hex back around on him in the form of an actual cloud of wasps he let out an objectively hilarious shriek of terror — but they did all know how to cast very effective Disorientation and Stunning spells, especially at such close range. Sirius was hit by one and very nearly staggered into the bay before he was helpfully re-oriented with a countercurse by one of the Beauxbatons students. 

Madame Maxime was battling one squadron’s leader (he wore the telltale green star) with artful streaming magic that sparked in ribbons like photographs Sirius had seen of the northern lights. With her every movement, surprisingly dancerly and graceful in a woman of her size, she blocked his blunt spellwork and pushed him back until at last she had knocked him out. Beside her, Flitwick, his petiteness almost comical in comparison, was warding off attackers aiming for her broad back with a series of whimsically clever charms, many of which it seemed possible he was making up on the spot. A burst of light from his wand became a gaping fishlike maw which became an army of tiny twittering birds which became a spinning golden ring of light which seemed to dance with its victim until it dropped him. Beyond them the Beauxbatons students had assumed a ring around one of theirs who had fallen, defending him with utilitarian but skillful magic. One of them was holding about three extra wands, and Sirius watched an MLE officer charge her bare-handed before he was knocked out with a well-aimed _Stupefy_. Closer to the dock, Pomona and Hooch had paused behind to help a fallen Auror, who had caught a Slashing Hex in the arm — Hooch was keeping the shield up through an energetic onslaught from the fortifications as Pomona cast the requisite healing charms. Meanwhile, Charity, Aurora, and Minerva had joined ranks with Kingsley and two other Aurors to press forward toward the doorway into the cliff; they appeared to Sirius like a single manifest being of magic, bathed in the brilliant multicolor light generated by their spells and counter-spells. 

With a carefully-aimed stinging net Sirius brought down the MLE officers who had surrounded the Beauxbatons students — they shouted, in unison, wands aimed unshakingly at the mass of bodies on the ground, _“Stupefy!_ ” _—_ and quickly joined them to check on the boy who had been hit. Fleur had knelt beside him to support his head while another student tried _Enervate_ to no avail. “His pulse is okay,” Fleur said, trying to keep the thread of panic out of her voice, “and he is breathing, but — ” 

“Sometimes it’s magic shock,” Sirius said. “Did any of you see what exactly hit him?” 

“One of ze red ones and one of ze blue ones.” 

“So a stunner and one of the disorienting charms.” Even as he said it he knew such a combination was unlikely to have this effect. What other dangerous spells looked blue? Through the vivid cicada buzzing of fear and magic and the bad resonance inside his mind he couldn’t figure out what to tell them. “Let’s carry him down — we’ll have to send one of the Aurors back to Hogwarts injured and she can take him with her.” 

Fleur kept a shield up and Sirius shot defensive spells around it while the other students floated the body down toward Hooch and Pomona and the injured Auror, who was holding her hurt arm gingerly to her chest. “Can you side-along with Thierry, Dora?” Fleur shouted as they approached. 

Just then there was a vivid crack of energy — a screaming brilliance as the fabric of space was briefly rent, and Sirius heard shouts of warning from the MLE squads and the Hogwarts contingent alike. For a moment he could not help his reflexive fear — Death Eaters, reminded his wartime memory, Death Eaters’ en masse Apparition and accompanying them as he had in the worst of their massacres the man-thing himself who seemed to draw most of his power out of death; Sirius sometimes thought he must have fed on it, like a lich out of the ancient stories in the Darkest books in the Black library — 

Sirius brought a second shield up between his party and the dock and Pomona echoed him. His heart was slamming in its cage of ribs like a demonic nocturnal visitor at the door. On the fortifications the MLE officers were again assuming martial (though thinned) ranks. Then the arrivals took physical form, and at the head of the contingent, twenty or thirty strong, were at least four Weasleys, and Harry Potter. 

They were all Hogwarts students in their pajamas, wands drawn, half Gryffindors with a smattering of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws and even a few Slytherins, and they had used someone’s bed curtains as a Portkey which now they lifted aloft into the rising sea wind like the flag of a small but fierce nation. 

_God fucking damn it,_ Sirius thought, not unfondly. 

The frisson of spells began again from every corner, the Auror named Dora Apparated back to Hogwarts with the unconscious Beauxbatons student, and Sirius, Pomona, and Hooch led a second charge up off the dock toward the fortifications, spearheaded by Patronuses vivid and incorporeal. This time, with far stronger numbers, they broke easily through the line of troops to join with Minerva’s group in the very mouth of the cave. “Potter,” she said, when she saw Harry, “for heaven’s sake…” But she rolled her eyes and quickly turned to spin an MLE officer’s disorientation charm into a cloud of bats, which circled his head woozily until he fell. Then they all stood in silence but for the sea in a field of unconscious Ministry employees. No one dared celebrate the apparent accomplishment until Fred and George Weasley set up a wild war whoop which continued as the entire group assumed sloppy ranks and headed into the cave, Sirius and the Aurors at the head of the contingent, Hogwarts professors bringing up the rear, older students on the outside of the flanks, younger ones toward the middle — except, of course, for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, who walked just behind Sirius and Kingsley. Hermione had manifest handfuls of bluebell flames she floated just in front of them to light their way more effectively than the existing subterranean greenish lights lining the floor, which threw eerie shadow into doors and passageways set deeply into the featureless black stone. After mere moments both the light of the nearly-full moon and the sound of the sea seemed to have dissolved into the darkness and the silence, and the Weasley twins’ joyful cheers had subsided too. Sirius had been thinking it looked like a supervillain’s lair from a Muggle comic book, but Harry said, “It looks like the Chamber of Secrets.” 

“It’s its own kind of Chamber of Secrets I suppose,” Sirius told him. “We can’t be certain though when it was — ”

Suddenly a flash of pale ectoplasmic light burst from the stone to Kingsley’s left — an unfamiliar Patronus, which he caught nimbly with a quickly-summoned glowing cage. It was a beady-eyed raptorish bird, a pale green, and jarringly familiar — 

“ _Stupefy_!” shouted another of the Aurors, wand aimed into a shadowy false wall. Hermione lifted a handful of flames close enough they could see the unconscious figure tucked against the smooth and wet carven stone — a young woman, with her blonde hair vivid in the shadow coming loose from its tight bun; she wore a scholar’s robes, with the bright badge pinned to her chest that denoted her a Ministry researcher. Beside it was a golden Slytherin alumna pin. It was Taylor Montcalm. 

“Oh, fuck,” Sirius said. 

“What is it?” 

“One of my students…” 

He knelt beside her, and Kingsley joined him, touching her forehead with the pad of his thumb. He cast a quick spell that Sirius didn’t recognize, a pale cloud of magic like breath on a cool day, which touched Taylor’s skin and glowed a bright neon red. “She’s under _Imperius_ ,” Kingsley said flatly. 

“Can you tell who put it — ”

“With two hours’ testing maybe I could tell. But it stands to reason either Ministry or… false Ministry.” 

“Well can we lift it? I think she’ll help us if we lift it…” 

Kingsley nodded and began an unfamiliar spell series (it seemed the methodology for lifting _Imperius_ had changed since Sirius himself was in Auror training) ending with _Finite incantatum_. Then, “ _Enervate_.” 

Taylor’s eyes flew open and searched their faces and Sirius noted in his peripheral Kingsley had kept his wand angled toward her chest, in case the spell series had failed. “Hi,” she said, voice fragile, “hi, Professor — ” 

She seemed to realize then exactly what had happened, because her eyes widened and welled with tears, and the color drained quickly from her face. “ _Fuck_ ,” she said, “fuck, fuck, fuck — ” 

Kingsley tried the spell again; this time when it touched her skin the cloud of magic glowed green. He touched Taylor’s shoulder and Sirius noted he was using some of the same surreptitious calming magic he himself had learned as an Auror and had often employed as a teacher during his students’ moments of romantic angst. 

“Fuck,” Taylor said again, shouting this time, “oh, God…” 

She punched the floor hard enough Sirius heard something crunch. She must have been feeling rather as Sirius himself had felt every one of the several times he had been influenced, twisted and motivated to achieve specific ends; it was a robbing of autonomy, a puppeteering violation. And in the end it had all been done — his influencing and hers — in the service of the same project. He wrapped an arm around her shaking shoulders and resolved not to lie to her. “It’s lifted now, Taylor; you’re with us.” 

“Do you remember who did this to you,” Kingsley asked gently. 

She shook her head. “Deep voice from behind me — three months ago? _Fuck_ …” She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes to hide she was crying, smearing blood from her busted knuckles through her hair and across her face. “There was an internship in the Ministry I had been tapped for but I turned it down and — ”

“They _Imperius_ ’d you into it.” 

“Yes — wait, _fuck —_ ” She lifted her hands from her face and scanned the crowd of teachers and students. “Is that why you’re all here? Smith is — ” 

“The spell series.” 

“He stole your notes, Professor, from that island; the spell’s transcribed,” Taylor said, frantic now. “And he got two more, two test subjects with it.” 

“Yes,” Kingsley said gently, “that’s why we’re here. How many are under testing?” 

“Forty-six,” Taylor said. “Almost all of them are from Coll School. We’ve, God, fuck, we set up all the fucking conditions.” 

“But the resonance — ”

Taylor looked up at Sirius. “What about it?” 

She couldn’t feel resonance, so she couldn’t tell it was bad. She had been the magical theorist on staff with the project and thus her word that it was possible had been taken point-blank. And it was likely the rest of them didn’t care bad resonance meant evil spellwork — to them the deaths of forty-six werewolves wouldn’t be so much evil as it would be a kind of unfortunate necessity. 

“Nevermind,” Sirius said. “Can you tell us where the testing room is? Or if you have any better ideas about how to stop Smith performing the spell?” 

“Down the hall on the left,” Taylor said, “it’s suite thirty-eight. There’ll be at least six squadrons of MLE and special police in there and all of them wearing earplugs. Or — there’s a fail-safe.” 

Kingsley and Sirius helped Taylor to her feet. “What kind of fail-safe?” 

“It lifts all the test subjects’ bonds,” she said. “It’s in the control room. It’s locked with magic but we might be able to fool it.” 

“Taylor and I will go to the control room,” Sirius decided. “Who’ll be defending it?” 

“Two MLE outside the door and two scientists inside,” Taylor said. She was exhausted and ashamed; it showed in her eyes, she hurt with guilt, and Sirius found he wanted to give her an opportunity for vengeance while the wound was freshest. Certainly it was what he himself had wanted — had longed for. 

“That’s fine,” he said, “you and I can take them. Kingsley and Minerva, you two should lead the charge down the hall… hopefully we can give you forty-six more combatants in a couple minutes.” 

In his years in the Auror Department he had had to put most of his self away inside a box. In his job he was a sort of weapon, at least at first, until he became a rapidly atomizing piece of a decaying defensive shield. There was no space for feeling anything beyond the work that was supposed to be done and the largest consequences; distractions were how people died, and devotions were how they ended up committing suicide. Dorcas, who in 1980 after Marlene’s disappearance had charged into a meeting of a Death Eater coven in Canterbury and killed eight (bloodily, their source had later attested) before Voldemort himself was summoned to kill her, which of course he did, while she laughed; “She must’ve gone bloody mad,” James had said on the subject, when he and Sirius met a week later in Hammersmith for tea, as though he wouldn’t’ve done it for Lily, as though Lily wouldn’t’ve done it for him, and Sirius had just said hmm, because he had been lying awake the interim nights wondering if he would do it for Remus — if he would’ve done it for Remus, if Greyback and company had finished what they’d started in December ’78. If Remus would do it for him, if he didn’t come back from one of the cleanup jobs (taking spell history, scrubbing blood from the walls) or one of the Floos on the hotline from backwater villages where toothless old wizards told Sirius in dire tones that they’d overheard rustlings in the bushes and around the cabbage patches. 

Perhaps he’d gotten too old to keep this up anymore. Too old and there was too much at stake and too much that had been lost that he had not yet had a chance to find again. First and foremost there had not yet been enough time. 

He dared a quick glance to Harry, who gave him a grim smile. No doubt all the students were a bit shaken to see Taylor — someone so young, someone they knew — caught in this kind of crossfire. “Send a Patronus if you need us,” Sirius told Kingsley, and he and Taylor hurried off into the darkness. 

The place was kind of a circuitous black hole and he could feel the skin-crawling feeling of the bad resonance amplifying with every further step they took. Taylor’s eyes were wide and bloodshot when she looked back to make sure Sirius was still following her. He wondered if she was still in contact with Riley. They took a tight corner into a staircase set so deeply into the darkness Sirius had to cast _Lumos_ ; the steps were wide black bowls smoothed with years and the ceiling dripped. “Can you tell me, Taylor, anything more about what you remember?” Sirius asked. 

“Well the Department at Oxford is basically just a funnel to the Ministry,” she said. “They offered me the internship pretty aggressively but — I want to do research, you know; I’m in this field to do research. They went so far as to get me disqualified for the grant I’d gotten to work at Chauvet. I mean that didn’t exactly get me on their side or anything so it must’ve been around then — ” She looked to Sirius; tears of frustration had sprung to her eyes again. “Dumbledore had told Smith back in June that wherever he was sending you might bear fruit. He wouldn’t say where it was but Smith suspected what kind of fruit it would be, given your work, given — well given why you were really sent there. I did all this research into how to enact neolithic spell processes and conditions… and then just last week after Dumbledore quote-unquote called off the project we heard it was Eynhallow.” 

“How did you hear that?” 

“Lucius Malfoy at the Ministry — he was elected to the Wizengamot last year but everyone knows he bought a seat. He said he had a passing interest in magical theory and had read about the site but I doubt that’s true.” 

“There’s a spy at Hogwarts — or there was, I guess. A Death Eater spy.” 

“Everyone knows about fucking Malfoy’s predilections. It’s funny, I guess, to be out of it now, and all along I was thinking, we’re playing right into their hands, we’re playing right into their hands, but it was like floating, and it didn’t seem like a problem.” 

“The Ministry’s denying — denying what’s happened, denying he’s coming back.” 

“Yes. Even those among them who knew he wasn’t dead thought they had more time.” 

It all came down to more time. But he had had twelve years that had felt like almost nothing at all — in which it felt sometimes like time had hovered more than it had moved. “Taylor — ” he started; he thought he meant to apologize, just for everything, but she pressed a finger to her lips. 

Here the black stone hallway rounded a bend into a tighter darkness, and Taylor had drawn her wand. She rounded the corner before Sirius and disarmed both MLE officers at the door wordlessly, then dropped them with a whispered “ _Stupefy_!” She darted forward to take their key badges from their belts before Sirius had even reached the door, and when she looked up her eyes were bright and wild. “There’ll be two,” she whispered, “white lab coats, at the panel — ” She indicated to her left. “Ready?” 

Sirius nodded, and with one of the officers’ key badges Taylor opened the door. The control room looked like the cockpit of a spaceship, and everywhere magical alarms were ringing, bursting bright color against the reflective black stone; through a glass screen into a cavernous space below Sirius could see and hear the lights and sounds of magical battle — no doubt Kingsley and Minerva’s contingent had made it into the testing room. He and Taylor stunned both scientists as they turned toward the door, and as she darted back into the hallway to set up a kind of tripwire spell Sirius went to the control panel to search for the fail-safe.

Through the glass screen he could see down into the room below — light and shouting, spellfire refracting and echoing — but he dared not search it now for Remus or Yates or even for Harry. This was war, he reminded himself; in war distractions got you killed. Toward the wide double-doors in the far left corner the Hogwarts contingent, clad in pajamas and bearing opaque shield charms, battled the MLE squadrons and the Ministry police in their pressed uniforms. On the floor arranged in artful rows were at least one hundred chromatic cots equipped with silver chains, like beds in a science-fiction prison hospital, upon which were bound the forty-six werewolf testing subjects, nearly all of them Coll School students still clad in their grey robes emblazoned with the red C. And in the far right corner of the room was a second chamber cordoned off behind a wall of magically enforced glass, protected by numerous wards and a dedicated MLE squad, in which Smith and Snape were arguing. Finally Smith lifted from the control panel a device like a wizard’s imagination of a Muggle microphone, and indeed when he spoke into it his voice was amplified throughout the suite — “Testing will begin!” 

On the floor the Hogwarts contingent quickly cast a massive shield charm encompassing them all, and Sirius watched Minerva cast an overarching Momentary Deafness spell. Those who weren't working to hold up the shield charm continued battling the MLE squadrons, though they had also erected their own protection. On the chromatic cots the Coll School students fought their bonds. Several were weeping; Sirius could see it more than hear it through the distance and the glass. 

Taylor was suddenly at his side and she indicated the fail-safe that would release the subjects’ bonds. It was protected and sealed with complicated encryption magic — the sort of spellwork a whole department of Unspeakables in the Ministry worked on crafting and breaking. Taylor tried her own key badge to no avail, then those belonging to both the MLE officers she’d stunned, and both fallen scientists. Over the loudspeaker Smith had begun to recite a runic ritual phrase Sirius recognized as a kind of prefix often used in magical theory research to recreate neolithic context. Taylor was biting her lip so tightly it had turned white; certainly she herself had taught the phrase to Smith, as Sirius had taught it to her. 

They both tried all the encryption magic they knew and all the deconstructing elemental magic — complicated cursebreaking spells that had always been beyond Sirius’s pay grade, or security clearance — and though Sirius felt his power as a kind of burning desperate molten gold in his own veins they could not break even a thread of it. 

Smith had finished the introductory phrase; he surveyed the room, and the silence felt weighted, and like the last ever silence; it seemed to hang, heavy and humid, like summer air before an evening thunderstorm. And then it was broken, though not by continued runic language. Beyond the Hogwarts contingent and out again through the double doors into the dark passageway still more light began to flash, more shouts, more spells — 

Sirius’s first thought was that it must have been Dumbledore with reinforcements, until he saw in the shadow the darkness — the cloaks they wore were heavy black wool and covered their faces, but they moved like humans, and the green light —

Taylor screamed. 

Smith began almost desperately, insanely, impossibly, to read the spell series and the language — the texture of it shifted serpentinely in the room and Sirius could almost taste it, metallic, stone and moss, and a deep almost-dead haunted blackness; he knew this kind of magic, it seized you first by the tongue and then by the soul; it was ancient as war, possessing and eternal as grief — 

On the floor at last amidst the silver cots Sirius’s desperate searching found Yates and beside her Remus, who at last had ceased to struggle. He met Sirius’s eyes with a familiar expression of brutal resignation. The expression perhaps he would have given Sirius if he had made it, a lifetime ago, through that November door into the Ministry courtroom. Thank you for trying, it said; I love you for trying, I love you; I’m dreadfully fucking sorry for it all… 

He had only ever been trying and trying was the half of it. In the long black days and even now he had never quite managed to get around to doing. Because he had been certain, and because he had been afraid. But he was as certain now. The fear perhaps in those days had been the same — the same thread of fear as always: what would he do, what would he take part in, what would he enact, because of how possessingly he loved Remus? 

He thought of Dorcas and her laughter. In the old days he’d worried that was the purest love could be. 

There were Death Eaters in the chamber with his godson, and Smith’s reading had reached a fevered hypnotic tone (it was not truly his voice, Sirius suspected, not anymore), and Remus lay back upon the chromatic cot — as though at last he had forfeited to fate — and as such there was nothing left for Sirius to do but to draw on the bad resonance. He pulled it up into himself and he felt its poison and its thread of darkness weaving, cauterizing, a falling black tapestry — he thought inanely of the _Exxon Valdez_. Darkness that spilled out from the place where it had been contained. A ribbon of it, of sickness, in the sea… 

He after all was used to being an unwilling vehicle for something horrible and larger. He pointed his wand at the encrypted fail-safe and focused and it felt like channeling an evil black lightning — a searing tearing molten heat — 

“ _Ecfringo_ ,” he said. Then it happened. 


	12. Chapter 12

In the long lightning shock moment Remus watched Sirius fall he thought, so help him, ah, we had a good run this time, didn’t we. We had stopped all the fervent concealment by the end. We had dared to sign letters with _love…_

He was on his feet before he even realized the shock of magic had broken his bonds. The sounds of the reading and the battle had stopped and there hung for a moment — in the clearing smoky air — a touch of un-silence, like the drone of a distant machine. Around him the students too realized they were free and stood and their uniforms shifted dark cuffs around their bloody wrists and ankles where they had been bound with silver. Those who had been crying pressed their tears from their faces. 

He moved quickly past them, toward the South wall where there was swarming darkness and perhaps a door and a staircase to the upper control room, because he had to get to Sirius; he had felt the shock and press of magic as he fell like a kind of momentary static, like the night on Eynhallow where he had had dreams… 

“ _Impedimentia_!” someone shouted, shattering the quietude, and Remus dodged the red bolt, feeling a kind of removed superhuman, like his footsteps weren’t footsteps, feeling the vengeful laughing thread of the resonance here like it had been in Azkaban — 

“ _Protego_!” he heard Indra cry, voice hoarse; her students added to it, strengthening its sticky opacity. 

Then the fighting began again anew. Half the students went for the MLE squadron guarding Smith’s control chamber with an emboldened viciousness Remus found he couldn’t fault them for. Beyond Indra’s shield charm the contingent from Hogwarts had been forced to join up with the remaining MLE and Ministry police to fend off the Death Eater incursion from the door, and he watched their shield charms falter and blow out, like bursts of dandelion seeds in an autumn wind; searing light, and refraction from the smooth walls, and the greedy starved resonance from the earth seeking death, drawing deep… Struck by a bolt of guilt Remus wondered if he should stay and fight — he had seen at least four Weasleys in the Hogwarts fray, and McGonagall, and Kingsley Shacklebolt, all of whom ostensibly had been dispatched to rescue him and a handful of lycanthrope teenagers from certain death — but he was wandless, and he didn’t dare draw power enough from this resonance to cast even a compass spell. 

He was used to feeling completely and utterly useless and like his very existence was a device to move the plot. Like he was employed when and where necessary to wreak death — to create conditions conducive to horror. He had drawn these factions together to himself and he supposed that was what he had been thinking when he had closed his eyes and waited to be erased… 

He had only ever been trouble. He had destroyed his parents and all his friends — he had ripped them limb from limb. Figuratively if not literally as they had certainly feared even if they had promised him they didn’t. He had driven them to holy fucking madness because he himself was sick — rotting out, as he had always suspected, as he had sometimes hallucinated in prison, around the spreading tearing wounds. _You the breaker of everything you have ever touched. You a creature who deserves a cage…_

For certain he could claim some of it had been transmitted but by daring to live and to be human he had made his own bed. If he had died on the Somerset moor or in the Guern woods as he had been supposed to would any of this have been? 

In the South corner of the testing chamber he climbed the steep stairs two by two and beneath him battle clambered as a kind of extending orchestral scream of voices upon voices bearing curses and hexes unforgivable for in that room were four factions each with varying murderousness directed toward all the other three. What with the rabid fray below he was not pursued and when he reached the hallway outside the control room he tripped a warning spell in his blinded fearful carelessness and from inside he heard a woman’s shout — “Don’t take — not one fucking step closer!” 

She had recently been crying but was trying to pretend she hadn’t, and she sent a bevy of unfurling green sparks out the door as a warning. 

“Are you in there with — ” his voice shattered. “With Sirius?” 

He could have left it all alone and none of this — he had to have waited beneath the window of Sirius’s rooms at Hogwarts. He had to have left that place when perhaps after all — but this would have happened eventually and no one would have stopped it. They would have found another potion and with that one they would have killed him. 

The girl in the control room stuck her wand out the door and then her blonde head. He showed her he was unarmed. “Lupin,” she said, not a question. 

“Yes.” 

She stepped out into the hallway and kept her wand pointed at his chest. She was very young — eighteen, nineteen; she wore a Ministry researcher’s badge, and a gilded Slytherin pin indicating her sometime house allegiance. When she stood against the wall she thrust her wand quickly toward the open door. “Go,” she said. 

He went. He felt her follow him. The panel looked as though it had been struck by lightning and a flare of char had colored the glass in a nuclear crepuscular stain. Sirius’s wand had rolled into a corner. The man himself lay in the floor and Remus saw amidst all the insect static in his mind (the black hole draining) that the researcher had rolled up her cloak gently under his head. 

“I tried _enervate_ ,” she said, behind him, “I tried all the good ones, the ones from Quidditch.” 

Under the fingernails of Sirius’s wand hand was a rime of black and there was a little blood — just a little — between his nose and lip catching there because he had not shaved in a few days. Remus crouched carefully beside him. As though he were sleeping — indeed, he would’ve looked like he was, if not for the blood — and sudden movements would wake him up. 

“He’s breathing,” said the researcher, as though Remus had not noticed. “His pulse is fine.” 

“It’s magic shock,” Remus told her. His own voice from far away, echoing outside his mind, as in a tunnel. “It happens when — ”

“I was a student of his,” she interrupted. He looked up at her and he saw for the first time (she had dared to lower her wand, just somewhat) that blood spiderwebbed her knuckles, congealing in thick black knots. “I know what magic shock is.” 

“Well what happened?” 

“There was an encryption,” she said, indicating the bombed-out panel, “around the fail-safe, and we couldn't lift it — and then it — he flashed — ” as though she were relating the story of an alien abduction she’d witnessed — “and it broke, and he — ” 

“What spell was it?” 

“ _Ecfringo_.” 

_Break_. 

He recalled unbidden what he had hallucinated in Azkaban after the third Wolfsbane trial and he had to look away. From the still face, and the closed eyes behind which nothing moved. He reached over and rolled Sirius’s wand out from under the burnt panel. When he picked it up it felt not so much hostile as wary. “What are you doing?” asked the researcher. She had lifted her own wand toward his chest again. 

“One of us should go and fight and one of us — ” 

Sudden cacophony of noise from the hall, from the stairs. The researcher met his eyes — hers vivid, bloodshot and frantic — and instead of shooting sparks through the door this time she silently squared off a neat refracting shield just inside the threshold. Any spells that touched the sheer membrane would mirror back upon their caster — and so apparently would the three teenage bodies, clad in cloaks over their Hogwarts pajamas, which threw themselves presently against it. 

“Fuck,” said the researcher, lifting the shield. Of course, of the scramble bodily tossed against the corridor wall, one was a Weasley and one was a wild-haired black girl and one was Harry Potter. As they gathered their bearings and got to their feet Remus could see their fear. “These fucking three,” the researcher said, not unfondly, “to think I thought it was over and done with when I graduated…” 

Harry darted to Sirius’s side and the others followed; Weasley was trying to pretend that the girl wasn’t supporting him. He’d been hit with something and his trouser leg was dark with blood. 

“What happened?” Harry asked. He touched Sirius’s forehead with the back of his hand as if to discern for fever. Remus had not dared to touch Sirius and spared a quick shadow wash of guilt. 

“It’s magic shock. He did — ”

“A spell too big,” said the girl, wide-eyed, “it can drain everything — ”

“Shut _up_ , Hermione!” 

“He’s breathing,” Remus said, gathering himself; someone had to do it, if no one else would. “And his heartbeat’s alright. We’ve tried to wake him up. But he needs to go to St. Mungo’s.” 

Harry reached and shook Sirius by the shoulders and for the first time Remus saw that there were tears brimming his eyes, and that one of his hands was full of blood. 

“He won’t, not like that, Harry; it’s no use,” he said. Dared to reach and grasp James and Lily’s son’s hand — to touch his skin for the first time since he was hardly a year old and in each chubby fist he grasped one of Remus’s fingers and tried to walk and they were both laughing laughing and Harry in his tiny shoes on the dewy grass — 

“What happened to your wrist,” Harry said. 

“It’s silver, they, in the cuffs was silver.” 

The hand he grasped he gently turned over. Harry’s palm was cut and the wound was neat and narrow, exact and measured as though performed by a doctor or a scientist, vivid along the lifeline, and the blood spread oxidizing orange through every small crease like an algae bloom in still water. 

The realization spread like a drop of silence. _Creocorpus_ , Remus remembered; all the Death Eaters needed to bring their master back to lifeishness was but a single drop of Harry Potter’s blood.

“They took,” said Weasley, “they had a vial.”

Harry looked at Remus and then looked away. With Sirius’s wand — which did not protest — Remus healed the wound across Harry’s hand and vanished the blood. “Which of them took it?” 

“A witch,” said Hermione, “black hair, madwoman — ”

“That’s Sirius’s cousin,” Remus told them, “Bellatrix Lestrange. Has anyone contacted Dumbledore?” 

“McGonagall did, when the Death Eaters arrived,” Hermione said. “She has a two way mirror.” 

“Right.” Remus stood, and his knees cracked; it was like stretching the rubber that must have been his heart to leave Sirius’s side. “It won’t take him long to come. You three should stay here,” he told them. “Keep an eye on Sirius. And miss — ”

He looked for the researcher, who had set up another mirror shield in the door and layered it, like a sheaf of paper, with other sorts of shields, some of them rather volatile, spitting sparks, others sourced from spells Remus had never seen outside of Sirius’s obscure theory textbooks. Her face was determined and murderous. “Taylor,” she said. 

“Stay with Taylor. Can you all do a Patronus?” 

“Harry can,” said Hermione quickly. 

“If you need urgent help call one up and send it to get me or McGonagall or better yet one for each of us. Alright?” 

They looked to him and nodded and he watched Harry’s now-healed hand tightly clasp Sirius’s shoulder. I was supposed to have been there, he almost said, long before. Instead he went out through the multitude of shield charms as Taylor made them permeable and some of them staticked on his skin like walking through a lightning field, or the brushing feelers of jellyfish, or on a bed of nails. 

If this could be done, he thought, perhaps all of it had been for this — 

“Lupin,” Harry said, just at the last, and he turned back to the control room. They were gathered around Sirius where he lay like the pieta in whichever apocryphal scene, watching out at him dappled in the light of battle through the smudged glass. “Remus,” Harry said, “good luck.” 

\--

Down the stairs in the cavernous testing room chaos was general. Indra had rallied at least half her students to her and led their charge against the Death Eaters in support of the Hogwarts contingent, but the other half continued fighting — some of them, wandless, by tooth and nail — with the remaining MLE to get into the control room, which Smith and Snape seemed to have vacated. A few Coll School students had even pulled their grey cloaks over their heads and joined the Death Eaters in the door. The ozone smell of shield charms blast through was rich and thick in the air with smoke and shouts and and a swarming malevolent magic that might’ve been the fight or the bad resonance or the revenant ghost of Smith’s attempted spell series. 

Bellatrix was nowhere in sight, even when Remus ran forward toward the front of the fray of Hogwarts and Coll School students, bolstering the shield a few of the professors were struggling to hold against an onslaught of Death Eater hexes. He recalled from the days of the first war that Bellatrix had never relished leaving a fight; she was always the last to Apparate, unless they had been summoned by Voldemort. Perhaps she had fled with the vial of blood to the dock where it could be fetched… 

But there would be no getting out this door; the battle raged in it, and in the corridor just on the other side. Though the Hogwarts and Coll School group beat the Death Eaters in numbers (more so when the remaining MLE officers who hadn’t fallen or fled were taken into account, though they hadn’t so much joined McGonagall and Indra’s contingent as they happened to be attempting to hex the same enemy) the Dark wizards’ superior power made the battle more evenly matched; their group, after all, constituted more grown and studied berserker spellworkers than teenagers, some wandless, in their pajamas. 

He heard his name from beside him in the fray and turned toward the sound; McGonagall was there, face drawn, and she clasped Remus’s elbow. “Alright?” 

“Have you seen Bellatrix Lestrange?” 

“Maybe five minutes ago. She went out toward the cave mouth. Albus is en route and we thought he might intercept — ”

“She has a vial of Harry’s blood.” 

McGonagall’s expression changed almost comically. “There’s a second door out into the corridor — down on the southwest wall.” She indicated with a surreptitious toss of her head into the shadow. “I can give you some cover. We can quickly get a group together — ” 

“I can do it,” he said, so he’d believe it. “It’ll be quicker just myself.” 

“Fine.” McGonagall waved over two older students, a Gryffindor and a Ravenclaw by their cloaks, with a flick of her wand. “Please tell me you both know _Fluctus_.” 

“Yes, ma’am.” 

“You’ll have about six seconds to make it to that door, Lupin; are you ready?” 

“Ready.” 

The crashing wave the three of them summoned billowed forth with froth like a rabid animal, realish as the Hokusai woodcut, and even as the humid tidal smell of sea traced with it through the room Remus knew it was made entirely of magic. He ran for the door down the Southwest wall before the wave even struck its target, and he heard McGonagall and her students follow it up with a barrage of spellwork — stinging nets and _impedimentia_ jinxes — to keep the fallen Death Eaters down. Behind him there was a cheer from the Hogwarts contingent as they made a stride forward, forcing the Death Eater party further into the corridor. 

The far door that Remus went through was guarded by precisely one Death Eater, probably a new recruit, whom Remus dropped with a _Stupefy_ before he even had his wand up. He brought up a spell at his back and the strongest _Obfuscate_ he could manage to prevent his being seen by the fray in the end of the corridor, and he kept to the shadows, eking his way toward the dock following little more than instinct and the guiding green lights set into the floor in the great black maze. When he remembered even a glimpse of Sirius lying still on the floor of the control room, of the blood inside Harry’s hand of the Coll School students’ robes bloody at the wrists and ankles who had joined the Death Eaters his stomach turned in a knot and he was obliged to shove everything down as deep as it would go into his very soul all the shock and the fear — the bite of pain at his wrists and throat and ankles and the trappedish nervousness of Sirius’s wand in his hand like a pinioned bird seeping up infectious through his blood. Like the shadow remnant of what resonance had once passed between them — 

He smelled the sea at last — the true sea. The heartbeat of it as it had been long ago signaling the tidal clockwork loop that orchestrated all things. In the mouth of the cave the moon above was a night from full and it moved through the shifting grey cotton sheaves of cloud and by the pattern of the stars it was just before dawn. In the windless cove was almost no sound but for the occasional breathing of the unconscious or dead MLE who lay scattered like dolls. There was one standing figure at the end of the dock who had awaited Remus there holding in one meaty beringed hand the small glass vial of Harry’s blood. It was Fenrir Greyback. 

The moon on the water like a frost of sugar — like a dropped jewel. Blue blush of light upon the stucco ceiling in the attic room, on the moor in the dusk, underground, underwater, present as a ghost in the long darkness, brushed inside his mind when he closed his eyes, like spilled watercolor. 

“Looking for something,” Greyback said. He held the vial out, over the sea; the blood looked almost false so dark was it beyond the thick glass. 

Remus lowered Sirius’s wand and stepped off the escarpment toward the dock and the receding tide. The sudden calm that had seized him was not the creature for he felt the marionette strings of the moon loose as though they had been cut. Rather it was certainty, certainty as though it had already happened, which perhaps it had. This time he would do it right. “What has he promised you,” Remus asked, “in exchange for this?” 

“You operate under the assumption I’m a common Death Eater.” 

“You are one. Without a brand is all.” 

Greyback’s smile was steely and slow. “You’re one to talk. As the Ministry’s dog — after all they did to you… You may not bear their brand yet but mark my words they will give it to you. And when they do it will not be in the service of your righteous fucking works.” 

“ _Righteous works_ is how they're calling Muggle slaughter now.” 

“Do not employ such tired rhetoric with me,” Greyback said, raising a chiding finger. “You know very well if any Muggle saw you as you truly are they would send a mob after you with torches and pitchforks and when they found you they would flay you alive if the Ministry had not found you first.” 

“He will not stop at one enslavement and you fucking know it. Do you think he’ll let you sit at the same table with the Notts and the Malfoys?” 

“I will not discuss private contracts with you.” 

“So you are contracted — even with all your, allegiance without bondage — ”

“Even before the twelve years you were in their cage you were locked up inside yourself,” Greyback said. Remus stood so close now he could smell the metallic weight of old blood — earth and moon, cigar smoke. “You cannot imagine freedom. You have never once in your life tasted it as you have never tasted blood.” 

“It isn’t the same.” 

“What isn’t.” 

“Freedom and — and murder.”

“On the contrary, Remus; the greatest freedom available to any living creature is the freedom to take another’s life. I’ve known it, over and over I’ve known it; I took yours, could you deny me?” 

He found impossibly he could. “You didn’t take mine.” 

Greyback smiled again, grease, his touch, in the room, his teeth and his breath; “Didn’t I,” he said, “I remember like it was yesterday, Remus, the taste of your blood; I remember how sweet it was to take you… whichever way — though you struggled…” 

“You’ve taken — not my life.” Nothing and no one can take my life. There was the barest lightning thread of it even in the greatest darkness. The whisper and the touch; he forgot who he was, he forgot he breathed, he forgot which direction time moved in, and the sea beat the stone, do you know nothing? do you see nothing? do you remember nothing? And yet the truth lay silver like the moon upon the water: “I have my life,” he said; he raised Sirius’s wand.

“Are you really going to _duel_ me,” Greyback sneered, bushy eyebrow cocked, sarcasm venomous, “with fucking — ”

“ _Ecfringo_ ,” Remus shouted, and the vial of Harry’s blood shattered; “ _Evanesco_!” and the vivid stain of it vanished from Greyback’s clasping hand. 

Greyback pulled a wand of uncertain origin from the pocket of his ragged black robes; it was short and stubby and of dark wood; he jabbed it toward Remus like a hack doctor. “ _Confringo!_ ” 

The bluish flames he summoned had barking reaching mouths like a pack of dogs, and the magic was feral, aggressive and territorial, in its wake it scorched the dock to ashes. Remus tried _Vaporos_ and routed the fire into smoke; the form it took was vaguely wolfish, like his Patronus; it swept across the cove and Greyback threw an arm up to cover his eyes. “ _Fluctus_!” Remus shouted, drawing the massive wave up out of the still water like an orchestra conductor, driving it onward. He dodged the bloody reddish bolt of Greyback’s desperate _Crucio,_ then a second. The wave had laid Greyback flat against the charred remnants of the dock. “Coward,” Greyback yelled, half-sitting, spitting seawater; his voice echoed in the quiet bay. “Come here and fight me like a fucking wolf.” 

“Get up and fight me like a wizard,” Remus called back across the water, gripping Sirius’ wand tighter; he could feel it fully on his side now, knowing as he did what sort of work had to be done. 

“You will realize who you truly are before the end,” Greyback said, struggling to his feet; “they will make you swallow it — and you will wish you had had any sort of credence or respect to pay for me — ” 

“ _Nauseum!_ ” Remus shouted, then, when Greyback doubled over again onto the dock, “ _Petrificus totalus_.” He froze the water under his feet as he walked across it to the edge of the dock where Greyback lay, twitching; he was strong, and Remus was tired (he did not remember the last time he had used so much magic in one sitting); in only so much time he would be able to throw off the spell. Sirius’s wand had trained itself on Greyback’s chest almost without any guidance from Remus at all. 

At last, he thought. At last. It was just a man, and his fat belly heaved, and his beard was stained with blood. The canine teeth had been sharpened to clumsy points. The rings he wore were cheap and tarnished. The sick yellow-red eyes were like a trapped animal’s. Above them the sky was paling into dawn; it seemed pathetically symbolic. _Gladium_ , Remus recalled, the spell to use one’s wand like a knife — 

Then the vivid shining crack of Apparition, like glass thrown against a concrete wall, behind Remus and Greyback toward the mouth of the cave. Remus’s attention wavered so infinitesimally he only realized it had when his eyes computed to his brain computed with the second crack of vanishing — when Greyback disappeared, as the sound was still dying in the cove. 

Before him the empty scorched dock — the still water spreading the coming dawn — “ _Fuck_ ,” he said aloud, like a spell, “fuck, fuck, no — ” 

It could not — he was just there — and it could have been — 

“Remus?” 

Dumbledore’s voice from behind him on the pier. He turned with the wand held aloft but the old man didn’t flinch. Streaming into the cave behind them already was a squadron of Aurors bearing before them the glowing ectoplasm of their Patronuses. 

“Are you alright?” Dumbledore asked. As though Remus had wandered out onto the bones of the dock like a madman seeking the clockwork rhythm of the ocean. “What happened?” 

Remus froze the water again with Sirius’s wand and came across toward the cave. His hands were shaking; the adrenaline that had flooded his entire body in the fight seemed to be rapidly freezing. Dumbledore reached for his shoulder and Remus dodged it as he had dodged Greyback’s _Cruciatus_ curses. 

“Greyback had a vial of Harry’s blood,” he said; “I broke it.” 

“Where is Harry?” 

“In the control room inside with — ” 

It was too thick and cold inside his throat to say, like a block of ice, like a manifest darkness. 

“With Sirius?” 

“Yes, yes, he — ” 

Dumbledore turned and strode toward the mouth of the cave and Remus followed. Inside the chaos was dying down; the Hogwarts contingent led by Indra and McGonagall had managed to force the Death Eaters closer and closer to the cave mouth, but they had quickly Apparated upon sight of the Auror squadron. 

Remus caught Indra’s eyes; blood had spiderwebbed at her hairline and across her forehead, and she was supporting one of her students; the grey sleeve of the girl’s robe was stained black and twisted. Indra gave him a nervous and tight almost tentative smile and he wished God more than anything he could have held Greyback’s fucking head aloft by the hair to show her — 

“The control room, Remus,” said Dumbledore. 

He led on, head spinning, but they were only halfway toward the staircase when Harry and Hermione and Ron (limping somewhat) rushed out of the darkness, ahead of Taylor, who was levitating beside her Sirius’s motionless body. Remus found he couldn’t look; if he went in there, he knew, there would never be any coming out — 

“Did you get,” Harry shouted, eyes wild, “Lupin, did you get — ” 

“Yes, yes,” Dumbledore said, looking pointedly and swiftly to Remus, “yes, it’s done.” He rushed to Taylor’s side: “Miss Montcalm, if I may…” 

She let Sirius down gently on the floor and in the green light he looked like a corpse dredged from the sea. Remus bit through the inside of his lip. Harry, Ron, and Hermione had gathered beside Sirius like a triplicate of mourners; Remus could feel Harry looking up at him with a confused sympathy. 

Dumbledore knelt and touched Sirius’s forehead. “Magic shock,” he said. “It happens —” 

“We know, sir,” Hermione said, rather diplomatically, though her voice was cold. 

“He’ll need to go immediately to St. Mungo’s — you see this condition can be rather serious when improperly treated — ”

“We’re going with him,” Harry said, as though stating a fact. 

“I’ll take him there presently,” Dumbledore said. “Taylor, if you will escort the children back to Hogwarts. I will contact you all as soon as is possible with Floo directions to join us at the hospital.” 

Taylor looked to Remus and then at Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and finally to Dumbledore. “Sir, I — ” 

“Once a Prefect, Taylor, always a Prefect, or at least I thought that was the motto…” 

“I want to go with Sirius,” said Harry again. 

“You will be of no use to him during the initial treatment,” Dumbledore said brusquely. “And you will be safest at — ” 

“I don’t give — I’m sorry sir, I honestly — clearly it doesn’t matter to me where I’ll be safest.” 

Inasmuch as he looked like James he acted quite a great deal more like Lily. Lily when Dumbledore had suggested she flee with the child to a safe house in Denmark; she had smashed a glass, and the force of her loosed power had dimmed the lights in the room.

“Well then,” Dumbledore continued, all seriousness now, “it is lucky for us that Remus was on hand to chase down your blood. Lest we risk the imminent return of the most evil Dark wizard this world has ever known.” 

“Well I’m dreadfully sorry for being the last fucking puzzle piece — ”

“Enough. You four will Apparate post-haste back to Hogwarts. We do not have time for petty arguments.” 

“What about Remus,” Harry said, looking up. 

“Remus will Apparate back to Eynhallow — ”

“No,” Remus blurted, without thinking. The cold feeling in his veins cracked and spiderwebbed like ice. 

“What’s that?” 

“I will not.” 

“Every single MLE and Ministry Police officer in the United Kingdom believes you are still an escaped fugitive — ” 

“I don’t care.” 

“You would risk Azkaban?” 

“You cannot tell me you can’t pull any sorts of strings — you had Pettigrew in your fucking hands…” 

“Would you risk, Remus,” Dumbledore reiterated, almost smiling; his was the same face, then, the same face from the door — “would you risk Azkaban? For him?” 

The old man would enjoy this; he would enjoy whatever proof he could convince himself this represented. Remus could not tell what response would signal humanity and which was something else, lesser or beyond, he only knew the truth: “God, yes, of fucking course. You — psychopath, I did before, didn’t I?” 

To think fifteen minutes ago he had felt so radically and unprecedentedly in control of his own fate and now again he felt shifted and directed like a gamepiece on a board. The silence seemed to fissure or subdivide like something living, and the pale green light — “I forbid it,” the old man said. “Now, Miss Montcalm — ” 

“You can’t just — ” Harry started, but he and Hermione and Ron vanished, along with Taylor; the crack of their side-along Apparition echoed in the serpentine chamber. 

“I will not endanger you,” Dumbledore told Remus when they were alone, “reckless as you may be.” With the cracking of his knees he stood; at his feet now Sirius lay limp and still as a ragdoll or a scarecrow.

“Fuck you,” Remus said, dared to spit, but it was mostly blood. “Fuck you, fuck whatever other fucking plans you have for me — ” 

“Every single plan I’ve had in the last two decades to slow the unfortunately inevitable and lessen its impact when it does arrive you have singlehandedly shattered. I know you don’t conceive of it as — as arrogance, but — ” 

“Arrogance?” 

“The nature of humanity,” said the old man, “is sacrifice.” 

_They will make you swallow it_ … 

He would not — could not. It tasted worse than Wolfsbane. 

“I won’t leave him.” 

“Will you, Remus; I’m touched… after all the times you did before…” 

“You forced — ”

Dumbledore raised an eyebrow. “Is that how you think of it.” 

Remus bit his lip and knelt and grasped Sirius’s shoulder, felt the warmth of his skin beneath his sweater, the stubborn and ponderous breath — “Come on,” he said, voice tight, “let’s go.” 

The look Dumbledore gave him was somehow more piteous than any he’d leveled through the window in the door to the cage at Azkaban. “ _Relashio_ ,” he said, as if he regretted it, and before Remus had even hit the far wall Dumbledore had grasped Sirius by the forearm, and they had disappeared. 

His head hit the stone, hard; he felt blood as a kind of serpentine ribbon down the back of his neck, warm and sweet, he shouted hoarse nothing and it echoed. When he managed to scramble to his feet his vision turned black and woozy and he fell to his knees, he punched the floor, twice, thrice, hardly feeling it. This time when he opened his mouth the sound was like a long bleating sob. The desperate cry of a lost animal in death throes. 

Another runic ritual phrase to add to the complete performance: 

_You will never see him alive again_

_You will never leave this place_

_You will never kill your master_

_You will never kill the rat_

He lay on the floor on his back and stared up at the ceiling until his head stopped spinning. The evil resonance tugged at him and the green underwater light — for a moment he forgot where he was, or what he was doing there, and when at last it came back to him he forced himself to stand. They had wanted him to die here, so he could not. He felt his way into the mouth of the cave with a hand against the wall, and at last when he reached the cove he found himself alone in that place, at the edge of the scorched dock, and the sun was high and bright. That night on Eynhallow he would be obliged to change alone. 

In the new light he watched at the cave’s black mouth as though it would speak. As though it had secrets or truths it could vocalize to him if only he waited and stood very still and listened. 

But there was nothing it would tell him that he would believe. He reached for Sirius’s wand in his pocket; it practically leapt into his hand. When he pointed it into the very heart of the cave he saw for the first time that his knuckles were shredded and bloody. 

Like Harry might he himself had long ago given a drop of his very being to make manifest a work. It was not easily destroyed once it was living. But as all living things it could still be wounded. 

“ _Displodo_ ,” he said. He watched — dust stinging his eyes — as the cave collapsed, thunder rumble deep and sustained, vengeful and swallowing as an earthquake. Only when the last of the displaced boulders had rolled to stillness did Remus turn again toward the sea and Apparate. 

\--

On Eynhallow — rather uselessly, as he knew he only had another six hours or so before he tore himself apart again — he cleaned the black gravel of that place from his wounds and healed them as best he could with Sirius’s wand. He tried to eat to no avail and at last he passed out in the remnants of the toast he’d burned with his head on the table; he woke at dusk when he could no longer sleep through the moon’s marionette tugging. 

He undressed and went to the henge and curled up behind the heelstone and reached into the earth. The gold — the presence and the touch — its warmth smoothed his broken knuckles, reached and tucked his hair behind his ear. Gentled the lesion at the back of his head and pressed as with lips against his cheekbone. 

_Love you, Moony love._

He wept horrible screaming hideous weeping in its cradle until the tidal strain of the moon at last seized him. 

\--

World and self came back at last to being. It took him a long time even with the buoying support of the resonance to lift his aching body from the ground. The sun was high — it had been risen now perhaps an hour and a half — and an unfamiliar snowy white owl was perched upon the heelstone of the henge, studying him with curious yellow eyes. 

He remembered all the events of the previous day and night in a characteristic excruciating flood and the sound in his throat unloosed tasted like a sob. He had had Greyback at his mercy and he had lost him — and he had lost Sirius… He saw for the first time that the snowy owl carried a thick brown paper package which he was suddenly sure would contain a message asking him to come identify — 

He reached for the parcel and tore it open; his hands were numb and white with cold, and the knuckles still scraped raw, and the blood under his fingernails was his own. His vision through one eye was red-tinged and blurry and he had bitten a bloody sore in his cheek and the vivid clawmarks that covered the old wound in his side were still bleeding sluggishly. When he pulled the wrapping from the parcel he found one of his shoulders did not behave as he thought it should. 

It had been worse — it had always been worse. He had not spent the night, he reminded himself, throwing his body against the cage’s door, nor the concrete wall; he had only spent it trying to claw himself free of his own mind. 

Inside the parcel a sheaf of cool and silvery fabric was balled up unartfully. He would’ve known it anywhere; it was James’s — Harry’s — invisibility cloak. When Remus shook it out a torn bit of parchment floated toward the ground in the morning stillness before he grasped it. Harry had scrawled a message almost illegibly quickly — 

_Lupin, I am not certain what is happening now but I’m taking the Floo over to St. Mungo’s presently. Dumbledore told me Sirius is in room 4J. I hope you will come when you wake up. See you soon — HJP_

His heart ached even to read it but he could not spare another moment to weep. It took him three assays to get up (one of his ankles also didn’t work as it should) and when at last he managed to limp to the cottage he was obliged to lie in the bed for another fifteen minutes or so before he could sit up straight. He had a glass of water and a bit of Pepper-Up Potion from the first aid kit under the sink, and he stood in the cold shower out back until the water ran clear of blood. In the mirror above the dresser inside he healed the wounds he could with Sirius’s wand, and he made more toast while he dressed. It took turning a piece of his mind off to put on a t-shirt and jeans belonging to (smelling like) Sirius. He put his boots on and his sweater and buttered the toast and ate it, and then he draped himself in the invisibility cloak (his shoulder twinged) and Apparated. 

In the atrium at St. Mungo’s designated for such purposes his invisible arrival was indistinguishable from the mass of cracks of Apparition and Disapparition. It was at once natural and unfamiliar to not be looked at. As though in the end he had only been real when Sirius had looked at him. As though he had truly been gutted of all form and substance — even vengeance, even spite — until even the outer shell collapsed. Perhaps the scraped-hollow feeling was simply the exhaustion or the blood loss, he reasoned. 

To avoid being jostled in the elevator he climbed the stairs to room 4J, pausing on each landing to circle his wounded ankle out and breathe. At the fourth floor he used a handy spell Sirius had learned at Auror training and promptly taught him in order to discern when he could sneak through the door unnoticed. When at last he managed he saw the hallway was crowded (it seemed most of the survivors of the fight had been brought to this wing, including several Coll School students, even those whose only sustained wounds were the silver burns on their wrists and ankles) but most of its denizens were asleep on the floor in nests of summoned and transfigured blankets and pillows, or they were deep in whispered conversation. Among them were the Ministry researcher Taylor Montcalm and a tall Asian girl in scholar’s robes (thoroughly decorated with punk band pins) who Remus didn’t recognize; they spoke together, faces very close, tightly clasping one another’s hands. He was filled with a tandem and complimentary rush of affection and envy. 

There was nobody clustered around room 4J, and when Remus performed the spell — hands trembling almost too wildly to hold Sirius’s wand — he found it was safe to open the door. The door beyond which, he thought, is the rest of my life… 

Inside Harry was alone, asleep in an armchair beside the bed. Against the high windows it was raining, but outside nothing could be seen but cold blue light upon wet brick. Sirius lay in the bed. Unlike the occasion of Remus’s previous St. Mungo’s sojourn the doctors had employed no Muggle medicine. Instead Sirius seemed enveloped in a pale and sheer cloud of magic, like a kind of protective defense against the outside world. Even through it his skin was ashen, and his lips colorless, and someone had tied his hair up messily; the few strands of it that had escaped were like inkspills against his face, and the sheets. 

The door snicked shut with a gentle sound, and Harry woozily opened his eyes, searching the room. “Lupin?” he said. 

Remus shrugged out of the invisibility cloak. “Hi,” he said; his voice wouldn’t amplify beyond a whisper. Scraped raw from begging the impossible from the moon. “Thank you. How are you doing?” 

“You look like utter shit. Do you want the chair?” 

“No, thank you, I’m alright.” 

“The doctors said they think he’ll be okay,” said Harry, following Remus’s eyes, which had found again the ring of char under Sirius’s fingernails. “It’s called a Restorative Magic Cocoon. It’s supposed to help with, with magic shock and loss.” 

He tried not to react, for Harry’s sake, to _shock and loss_. “Funny concept, isn’t it. A restorative cocoon.” 

Harry almost laughed. “Perhaps they’ve learned something from moths.” 

“They’d do well to learn anything from anywhere that’s not up their own asses.” Harry laughed at that, this time for real, but his smile up toward Remus was thin and wobbly. “How are you doing?” Remus asked him again. 

“I’m okay, I guess.” 

“Is your hand alright?” 

He showed Remus his palm; the wound Bellatrix’s knife had left had healed without a trace. “Thank you for getting it back,” he said. “I feel like such an idiot. I suppose — ”

“The old man needs to realize if he doesn’t want you to be reckless he needs to let you know what’s going on. Or else you’ll go and try to figure it out for yourself. The same is true with me, come to think of it.” 

“Sometimes I think — we have to be in the dark so he has to help us move through the maze,” Harry said, voice lowered conspiratorially. “When if we could see — we could choose our own path. But that might not be the path he wants us to take.” 

“That sounds about right.” 

“But it might not be — it might be the path to the wrong ending.” 

“It won’t be,” Remus said, though it was the kind of fear, now vocalized, he realized had been with him all along. “We’d make the right decisions. Everything that happened last night after you arrived was a path we took ourselves, wasn’t it? And we ended up alright.” 

“They almost got — ”

“They didn’t. Almost is different.” 

“I like that,” Harry said, smiling, “almost is different.” 

“Your dad used to say it all the time when we were in school and it drove me fucking crazy. Because it is true. But just barely getting away with something by the skin of your teeth is just an excuse for more extreme recklessness.” 

Harry laughed again, but also he was almost crying. Cautiously Remus rounded the bed as though he approached a skittish animal. It was an immense relief to be able to lean some of own aching weight against the armchair. “Can we touch him,” he asked, feeling rather stupid or glaringly obvious, feeling rather reckless, to say the least, but he found he didn’t care if Harry suspected. “Can we like, hold his hand, in the cocoon.” 

“Yes,” Harry said; his voice was soft, and when Remus looked at him he saw the Lilyish eyes were brimming with tears. “Yes, the doctors said it would be alright.” 

Almost tentatively as if into a trap Remus reached through the soft membrane of magic and clasped Sirius’s forearm, passing his thumb across the ridges of veins and tendons vividly visible so pale was the skin. Harry reached and grabbed Sirius’s hand, and then he could hold it back no longer and his shoulders jumped; he turned his face from Remus to hide its twisting. 

He dared to be so human to rest his other hand high on Harry’s back. “It’s alright,” he said, as though it were. 

“It’s my fault,” Harry choked. 

“No, it isn’t; it’s mine.” 

“But — ”

“Don’t argue with me on the subject,” Remus said, forcing a smile, “you’ll lose.” He squeezed Harry’s narrow shoulder. “Besides, first of all, it’s probably Voldemort’s fault, then Snape’s and Mr. Smith’s, then Dumbledore’s, though that order is possibly all interchangeable, then me, then maybe you.” 

“Sixth place, huh?” 

“Yes, not advancing to the next round, sorry.” 

They sat together quietly in the room and eventually Harry fell asleep again and Remus watched Sirius breathe, squeezed his hand, willed all the life he could spare out of his own veins. Paced in the window when the rain moved away and the light came in weakly upon the floor. Sat in the windowsill at last and dozed off and as such he was half-asleep when, with a drama and intent he perhaps should have foreseen, Dumbledore strode in the door. 

The old man met Remus’s eyes with a kind of unsurprised disappointment. Then he looked to Harry, who had leapt to his feet and palmed the moisture quickly from his face and crossed his arms indignantly over his chest. 

“Fine,” Dumbledore said after an itchy silence. “Remus, I suppose this concerns you as well.” His heart fell, a cold stone, into his stomach, and he went to Harry’s side again as though it would soften the blow of whatever news if they received it as a united front. “I’ve been speaking to Doctor Zammit in the hall,” Dumbledore said. “She is optimistic Sirius will make a strong recovery.” 

Harry exhaled in relief but Remus’s ears were still ringing. “Strong but not full,” he said. 

“Yes.” Dumbledore eyed Sirius in the bed with a removed appraisal, like an antiques collector, and Remus bit his lip. “Not full. The doctors will come in in a few moments to remove the restorative cocoon, as quite simply it is of no use. Sirius will never perform magic again.” 

Harry sat heavily in the armchair and Remus, feeling numb, squeezed his shoulder. 

“There may be other side effects that we should learn about when he wakes up. Remus, I am in the process of finding another research grant this time via the St. Andrews’ magical theory department which hopefully doesn’t have quite the same glaring Ministry allegiance…” 

The old man went on but eventually he started to sound like the rain against the windows, a blur of sound, sourced from another world. Harry had begun to cry silently again and he studied his hands in his lap and Remus squeezed his shoulder again, watching Sirius breathe, Sirius who would wake up changed and hollow, thinking, as ever, this is how it’s going to be from now on… 


	13. Chapter 13

** Meayll Hill, Isle of Man  
** _ February 1995 _

\--

He woke after midnight, alone in the bed with dreams. Spreading upon the floor through the smudgy window rimed with frost was the pale blue-white glow of Remus’s bluebell flames, which denoted he had gone, as ever, out to the henge to study while Sirius was asleep. 

Under Sirius’s contract with the Department at St. Andrews’, upon which Dumbledore had gleefully forged his signature whilst he was still unconscious, he was supposed to turn in a publishable manuscript of his findings toward the end of the grant period in October 1995. It became immediately clear upon his regaining consciousness that said project would be literally impossible as Sirius could no longer perform any magical theory practice nor could he even feel resonance, which had caused him a five-day metaphysical sulk (or at least, he’d only been obvious about it for five days) upon his and Remus’s arrival by Portkey at Meayll Hill on the day after Halloween. Sirius had gone so far as to write to Dumbledore to ask if the contract could be amended only to receive from the old man a photocopy of the initial paperwork indicating with arrows inscribed in bright red ink that it had been not only signed but also notarized. 

For ten minutes or so he watched at the movement of the light upon the ceiling reaching desperately for approximately the nine thousandth time into the earth for the resonance to no avail. He knew it was strong here because he had seen the spell history Remus had taken and tried to work on surreptitiously, and he had watched the scant few times Remus had dared do magic in front of him the feral way it seemed to sizzle and crackle from his fingertips and from Sirius’s wand, which Remus had come to use. Like an electric shock of magic, and it seemed to surprise Remus every time he did it, and it always made him look very guilty, and it set Sirius with goosebumps. 

So Remus had started making notes for the book, late in November, and Sirius had unearthed his notes for the Treatise on Muggle Performance of Magic and begun again to work on it as now he supposed he was rather in the same boat as the subjects of his study. He’d finished the manuscript in January and sent it off to his publisher and had spent February so far contacting the American scholars who had once asked him to write textbook introductions asking if they were interested in any updated copy. He and Remus didn’t need the money — they were sent a seventy-galleon stipend a month, half of it in Muggle pounds to facilitate shopping in town, by the Department at St. Andrews’, their accommodations (a double-wide trailer on the bluff behind the henge, its location secret kept by Riley Song) had come fully furnished, and they had even been offered weekly cleaning visits by a house-elf which Remus had vehemently denied — but Sirius supposed he rather needed something to do; he had tired after about two weeks of visiting the shops and making overwrought and only vaguely edible meals Remus still could hardly eat. It was more writing work or it was needlepoint, he thought, surveying an embroidery kit for sale secondhand in town. 

He couldn’t sleep. He had never gone out to join Remus on one of his nighttime excursions to the henge before but he put his slippers on and his housecoat and in the kitchen poured a little scotch into a jam jar and took it outside. Remus didn’t even look up at the snick of the screen door in the lock. The flames he had set burning in a tall jar beside him illuminated his face with a kind of haunted and subterranean loveliness. His mouth was just open, and behind his closed eyes something moved. 

Sirius sat beside him not daring to touch. His very — his sculptural stillness and his searching. Silent but for the wind and the sound of the quill in the Silcox Method ever scratching at a roll of parchment. From this vantage the moonlight upon the water seemed like a dropped veil. Across the strait to the East the pale evening lights of the mainland were visible. When he had woken up in the hospital Remus had been there playing cards with Harry; it was three days after the full moon and he was unslept and exhausted and looked it, wan, spread thin, skin almost translucent. At the dawning look on Harry’s face he turned toward Sirius in a pale and spreading pool of sun. 

They had argued to typical effect not long after their arrival at the henge and the double-wide and of course it was the argument that had shaken Sirius out of the five-day sulk or at least motivated it him to better conceal it. He had woken up from fifteen hours’ fitful sleep to find Remus out front casting wards — familiar ones, from the days of the first war — never mind of course the trailer was secret-kept, which should have rendered all other protection unnecessary. Sirius, standing on the threshold in an unfocused and livid awe, realized that for years — since the events of December ’78, if not earlier — he had been setting himself up as the Caretaker between the two of them (he later reasoned perhaps it was part and parcel of his two-decade apology to Remus for the Prank) and now found himself utterly incapable of taking much care at all. 

For a very long time they had been trying to apologize to each other silently or at least without without the exact words in order to keep from vocalizing the fact of it all and thus actually claiming responsibility. It all came flooding — pouring out, and outside it began to flurry. At last he wept, sitting at the table, because it was all gone, it was really gone; it had been sucked out of him, he had been vacuumed out on the inside, and the great cold black vacancy was like a dying star, sinking, magnetically heavy, turning inside out, dissolving. Remus embraced him, his hands were cold, and still he felt hardly there, he was saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, as though it were all his fault, which Sirius would admit he had entertained in his darker moments it was. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m so so sorry. Not long following they fucked on the kitchen counter with no magic, tearing at each other’s clothes; “Just spit,” Remus said, “in your hand, it’s alright,” and Sirius knew he had to have hurt him, but couldn’t really in the moment bring himself to care. Afterward they sat naked on the cold kitchen floor; they couldn’t see more than a yard out the window now in the sudden blizzard, and Sirius apologized, nominally for the sex but probably for many other things, and Remus said, “Shut up.” Since then it had not been perfect but it had been alright. 

There was a spindly ladder behind the trailer left by a former inhabitant and suspended mostly by magic, down to a tiny crescent of sand only accessible at lowest tide. They climbed down together and gathered mussels and seaglass and strands of kelp for potionmaking and later in the kitchen Sirius steamed the mussels in beer and arranged the seaglass in a jam jar in the window while Remus dried the kelp with magic and tucked it in the potions kit they kept under the sink in the kitchen. Sometimes they lay in bed together for hours unspeaking and once they went down to the bar in town and got hilariously wasted and half-carried each other home in the frigid biting wind off the sea. They wrote together at the table for hours and lost track of time and they listened to old records and sometimes he caught Remus staring intent and unblinking as if hypnotized at the same page in his book or at the floor or the window and sometimes he woke Sirius up crying in his sleep. Sirius bought a Muggle television at the secondhand store which picked up only four channels even when Remus jerry-rigged it with magic and a metal coat hanger. They listened to the radio: to _Interview with the Vampire_ and _Belladonna Report_ and _Witches Brew_ and the other shows on 88.6FM playing anarchist propaganda and conspiracy theorizing and shitty classic wizard rock and between it all a ghost of realish-feeling news about the war that they clung to in silence the way they clung similarly to letters from Harry and Kingsley and Taylor, dispatches from the thick of it. 

At the henge he watched Remus’s trance for any outward signs. The soft bow of his mouth seemed almost sleepily unbothered but the furrow of his brow approached concern. The quill was scratching runic text Sirius didn’t know — different from the language of the spell history on Eynhallow. He let it come to the end of the phrase before he grasped Remus’s knee, which was warm, and the fabric patched badly with flannel; he looked like a grunge sideman, except too old. It was almost his thirty-fifth birthday, Sirius remembered with a sudden jolt. He watched the quill’s diction slow and cease like an engine dying and then he felt Remus’s consciousness, through the touch, resurface to the living world — he could almost visualize it, rushing at him, a golden thread from the darkness, from months of darkness, leapt into his veins and swimming — 

It was gone, when Remus opened his eyes, as quickly as it had come, and Sirius’s nerves felt cold-scorched and tingling. “Hi,” Remus said, surprised, “did you bring me some scotch?” 

“Something to warm your old bones.” 

“Ha ha bloody ha,” said Remus, but he took the tumbler from Sirius’s hands. His were cold, and when he cast a quick spell to warm them up Sirius felt the crackle of magic and resonance as something entirely alien, entirely other. Like being touched through some portal from another world. 

“What’s in there?” 

To think they had been living at the henge for a little over three months now and he had not asked before. 

“Cobwebs,” Remus said, taking a sip, “and some ghosts. I can tell they’re there but I haven’t really seen them yet.” 

“Any idea why the old man sent us here?” 

“Not an inkling. In fact I was beginning to entertain the notion perhaps he did indeed send us here just to hide.” 

Sirius laughed and Remus gave him a kind of sideways hidden smile like a ripe fruit concealed by summer leaves. They watched the stars’ movement until Sirius found himself nodding off, and Remus replaced the spells upon his equipment and together they went inside to bed. 

\--

After the Event Remus had been issued a quick and quiet pardon through some string-pulling of Dumbledore’s in the Ministry. There had been a blurb on page twenty-six of the Tuesday _Prophet_ and likewise in the _Times_ of London acknowledging the fact of his innocence and his heroism in the Battle of the Oban Coast. The mugshot they had published with every previous story about Remus (usually coupled with a gruesome “artist’s rendering” of a werewolf transformation) had been replaced with a photograph taken of him by a _Prophet_ photojournalist in the atrium at St. Mungo’s, in which he was holding a cigarette out of frame, and his nose was pink with cold. The Triwizard Tournament had officially been called off and two units of Aurors totaling 36 fighters had been dispatched to Hogwarts to patrol the castle and grounds. The Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students had returned to their schools, but Karkaroff’s whereabouts still had not been determined. Indra Yates, who contacted Remus via owl or Floo almost weekly, had petitioned an official challenge to the statute that had closed Hogwarts to part-human students and created Coll School, and as such the Hogwarts Board of Directors was preparing to vote on its repeal. “I’m not optimistic,” she said, head in the Floo on a Sunday morning, “but at least Smith’s not around anymore to come up with some other bullshit countermeasure.” Her youngest daughter Daya poked her head in curiously a minute later and waved joyfully at Remus whom she knew because now that Sirius couldn’t transform into a dog anymore Remus had gone to visit them on Mull each full moon since their arrival at Meayll Hill. Sirius encouraged him to go (the one time Remus had ordered a course of Wolfsbane he had poured it down the sink) and then stayed up all night drinking. As such when Remus got back a few hours past dawn they were usually in similarly terrible shape, achy and exhausted, blood feeling poisonous, and they would argue mildly over nothing, one of them would puke, and they would pass out together in their clothes atop the blankets. 

Smith, Dumbledore had told Sirius in a letter after he had repeatedly demanded information on the subject, was thought by the Ministry’s Intelligence department to have fled to America; though he had purchased a Muggle plane ticket to Sao Paulo it was commonly understood that he had connections in Washington, D.C. There were initiatives underway to seek extradition though what they would do with him if they got him back was unclear because as a precautionary measure after the escape of Bellatrix and company and the evident complicity of the Dementors Azkaban had been cordoned from the sea with highly experimental magic. _You will be pleased to hear_ , Dumbledore had written in December, _that the Ministry has hired a private P.R. firm (Bledgely and Kirk, the same firm you may remember hired by the Canadian Magical Parliament after the public disgrace of the Federal Interlocutor for Magic-Muggle Relations) in order to enact an Accountability Project — fessing up to and apologizing for the Oban Facility, the testing program, the Coll School, et cetera. There is talk of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission which Remus be forewarned I may ask you to serve on…_

Remus had laughed a glass-breaking kind of laugh and burned the letter. But later that afternoon he wrote to Indra, and he wouldn’t let Sirius see the parchment, nor her response, which came the next day. 

Sex was different, again, through marginally, and Sirius thought whilst he laid awake some nights that it was the seeming symptom of something else different or changed that most frustrated him. It did not happen infrequently; sometimes there was little else to do, and there was a great deal of lost time to make up for, and they had each been certain now several times removed that they had lost each other. Remus would come in from the henge or up from town with his nose and cheeks pink with cold and their kiss by the woodstove would turn something else. His freezing hands pressed up inside Sirius’s sweater. Something about this was as exciting as it was shaming: acting as Remus’s sort of kept man, waiting for him in the house, making dinner, drinking scotch, ready when he asked. They went tripping over each others’ feet into the bedroom; as he rolled a condom on Remus prepared himself, which was vaguely thrilling to watch, as Sirius had always sort of liked it, but had been uncomfortable asking for it since the late seventies, and then he pressed Sirius back in the pillows and the blankets and the cold light (it always seemed like dawn) through the dollar-store curtains and sat deeply, taking him inside; his eyes were closed and his head was cocked as though he was listening for something — like a heartbeat, or a distant birdcall — and Sirius’s hands traced his hips and thighs and belly before he shoved Sirius’s wrists back against the bed. They didn’t speak; this is fine, he thought, and not much else; Remus’s mouth was just open and his eyes were very bright, and he rocked for a moment and then lifted up and just at the sight of his thighs trembling Sirius made an embarrassing desperate noise he swallowed. He came first and jerked Remus off, still inside him; the feeling of it, wringing him out, almost got him hard again. But afterward they lay in bed together kissing and Remus took care of all the magical cleanup when Sirius went to the kitchen to throw out the condom. You don't have to hide it from me, he almost said, but later when he thought about it he wasn’t sure he could bear it. Still despite the seeming non-issue Sirius doubted it would be as very simple as going to the drugstore to get a tub of Vaseline to prove (more to himself than to any other party) that he was worthy of being Remus’s lover. 

The way the war progressed they understood abstractly. They had subscribed again to the _Prophet_ , and even the Muggle news reported on Suspicious Explosions. 

\--

Harry wrote a long and detailed letter to tell Sirius and Remus that Aurors had narrowly beat back a Death Eater attack on Hogwarts, which Kingsley and Taylor corroborated in follow-up letters. _Harry led a contingent of students literally floating pieces of the castle and dropping them on Death Eaters’ heads from the Astronomy tower_ , Kingsley wrote, _I would say he takes after his father but I actually remember Lily primarily using that spell to publicly humiliate James._

Sirius wrote to Dumbledore the next night while Remus slept. _Let me come back to Hogwarts and help protect my godson_. He knew what would be said and already thought he knew what he would do because of it but he thought he needed to see it on paper before he believed it to be true. He waited for days sitting on the stoop with cigarettes and ash smearing on his old notes from Eynhallow but Dumbledore didn’t dignify his request with a response. 

\--

The doctors had come to tell him at St. Mungo’s that magic loss in those with his condition was not uncommon especially in moments of what they called “magical overextension.” He asked them how magical resonance might play into such an effect but found they must have had no magical theorist on staff at the hospital. An encryptor from the Ministry came to talk to him about how exactly he had broken the spell that locked the fail-safe and left with, she said, no conclusive concepts for how such magic could be possible. Taylor came to speak with him, alone, late at night; she had left the Department at Oxford and she had answered some questions for the Auror contingent that was dispatched to America after Smith and she had undergone extensive testing to see who had Imperius’d her only to see the results inconclusive. She said in a week she was moving to St. Andrews’ to live with Riley and apply for a transfer. It had been months since she had heard from her family and wondered if she had said something whilst under the spell. “You were almost glowing,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, remembering the night at the facility, “but it was dark. When you said the spell it wasn’t really in your voice. And your wand was like — like a thick harp string vibrating.” 

Dumbledore had sent Harry back to school so Remus sat with him in the hospital room most nights. He was using Sirius’s wand, which he must have taken at the facility, but there was no need for him to give it back, and they both understood it without needing to discuss. Sirius, as ever, did not think he could bear to discuss. In the day when Sirius was forced to entertain other visitors and doctors and magic loss researchers Remus was busy moving their things between the cottage on Eynhallow and the trailer at Meayll Hill which he described to Sirius in humorous detail. 

One night after Sirius had been conscious about a week Remus snuck in cigarettes and chocolate and two nips of scotch and he helped Sirius sit up and perched on the end of the bed. They sat together in silence for a while because Sirius could tell Remus was working up his bravery and/or trying to turn off that silencing compartmentalizing piece of himself and indeed at last he said, “Greyback had taken Harry’s blood. We fought, and I broke the vial. I was this close — and the old man showed up with fucking bells on.” 

They had not spoken about this yet — not at all. Not about that night nor the morning into the dawn and the day. 

“We went inside and they had floated you out into the hallway. Taylor took the kids back to Hogwarts. I had grabbed your shoulder like — so we would have to side-along together. But the old man — ” he laughed — “he said all this — and he threw me off, basically.” 

The exact nuances of why Dumbledore seemed irked at Remus’s presence in the hospital seemed glaringly apparent now. “How did you — ” 

“I woke up after the full moon and Harry had sent me his owl with James’s cloak.” There was a brimful of unshed tears sitting just inside his eye reflective and bright and balancing. “I would’ve lost — if I were still there. I would’ve lost my fucking mind.” 

He would’ve made a joke about it, a week ago, fifteen years ago, twenty years ago, ah, Moony, I didn’t know you had any mind left to lose, you bloody stoner, ha ha ha; instead he reached between them and grasped Remus’s forearm, and Remus said, “I destroyed it; did they tell you?” 

“No,” he said, but he wasn’t surprised.

“I caved it in.” 

“They’ll get Lucius Malfoy or one of their other high-powered coke-snorting Dark lawyers to sue you for damages.” 

Remus laughed, but a tear circled the purple ridge under his eye before he smudged it away. He pressed his temple just for a moment against Sirius’s bent-up knees. In the soft enchanted light the grey bits in his hair seemed like an artful kintsugi rime of silver. “I can’t burn Azkaban,” he said. “So it was my second choice.” 

He slept in the chair beside the bed and in the morning gave Sirius a chaste kiss and Apparated away. When he was gone Sirius watched at the window spreading weak autumn dawn light across the floor, feeling hollowed out, scraped to the rind like a melon husk, loving him massively. Like the endless towering spire of a thundercloud. 

Would you say it was a fair trade then, said a tiny voice in the back of his mind. He forced himself to press it away. 

Not long afterward — as soon as he could rise from bed for more than ten minutes at a time — they put him through a humiliating week of testing to determine if he truly no longer had any magical ability and would thus be eligible for certain Squib Welfare benefits via the Ministry. He was part of a cohort of St. Mungo’s patients whose sudden- or gradual-onset squibness had at last run down to brass tacks. Together they were tasked to perform almost pathetically simple spells — spells Sirius had learned from his nanny at literally age five: a spell to boil water, a spell to cut one’s fingernails, a spell to light a fire. _Lumos_ , which seemed rather symbolic. One of the patients was only seventeen, but magic loss disorders ran in her family, and, having accomplished nothing at the end of all the tasks, she fled the testing room in a flurry of tears. Sirius for his part quashed an urge to run out after her toward the seediest bar in this part of Muggle London. 

Instead he went back up to his room where a researcher was waiting for him in the windowsill reading a day-old _Prophet_ : _MURDEROUS WEREWOLF GANGS — IN OUR VILLAGES?_ blared the headline. The researcher was young, in boat shoes and khakis, with an American Southern accent; he had studied at the Athenaeum in Athens, Georgia, and then for a while he had gone to Richmond Institute, and now he was in the Magical Maladies doctorate program at Cambridge studying the treatment of magic loss disorders.

“We’ve had relative success with a couple prototypes,” he explained, pressing a pamphlet into Sirius’s hand. “Depending on the subject of course. Most test subjects could get to the point where they would’ve passed that test you just took. Which of course not everyone wants to, because it would mean they’d be denied Squib Welfare benefits.” 

Sirius would gladly shirk all the benefits if it meant he could boil water again with just a spell. 

“Of late it’s only been tested on those suffering from sudden- and gradual-onset squibness,” said the researcher. “Which is why you’re an interesting case. Magic loss via magical overextension is extremely rare.” 

Sirius was rather reluctant to be a rare and special guinea pig after all that had just happened. But he accepted the pamphlet and the researcher’s card and read it over that night while smoking one of the cigarettes Remus had smuggled in: 

_In our trials we have achieved some success treating magic loss disorders in three cutting-edge ways_ , said the front fold alongside a moving photograph of a joyous if disappointingly heterosexual witch and wizard laughing as they gestured with their wands over a boiling cauldron. _Through magical theory and resonance, potions and elixirs, and magic immersion therapy at our state-of-the-art facilities in Cambridge, we have helped several witches and wizards suffering from magic loss disorders regain their confidence — and their lives._

Sirius noted the noncommittal and rather depressing language — “some,” and “several.” Still he read through the ecstatic quotations (“ _Dr. Richards and his team saved my life, my magic — and my marriage!_ ”) with something he might’ve classified as a pang. 

_As though it couldn’t get any better, each trial comes with a fifteen galleon stipend! What are you waiting for? Contact us today._

In the clever fold below the researcher had tucked his card. He had introduced himself as Jack, but the card said: 

_Buford Jackson van Clement IV  
_ _Cynwyd Fellow in Magic Loss Studies  
_ _Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Magical Maladies  
_ _MacArthur Wizarding College, Cambridge University_

Reflexively Sirius snapped his fingers to burn it all before remembering of course he no longer could. In the end he stuck the pamphlet into the enchanted flame beside the bed until it turned to a glossy molten char he cooled with his breath and tossed in the general direction of the trash can (it missed). He did however keep Jack’s card, which he hid for safekeeping in one of the books Remus had brought him from a Muggle bookshop down the road. 

He remembered his first bad fight with Remus at the end of the halcyon summer when he had found a pamphlet to the same effect and for the life of him he could not understand why Remus had been tempted to do it. Why after every good thing that he had — that they had. God when he thought about it he had been so willfully blind about so much. Heaven help him but he hadn't understood for a good twelve hours after the Prank why James was so upset about what he’d told Snape. 

It was who (it was _what_ , said a tiny voice; Sirius ignored it) Remus was before anything else, or at least it was what he believed himself to be before anything else, and he hated it. He wanted it gone. He wanted it all to go back to the way it had been before because it could not exist without the memory of how it had come to be. Tantamount to the condition itself was the method of inheritance — of transmission — the disappeared night where it had been communicated to him like a secret on the Somerset moor. 

Nearly now he understood. He could knock upon the door of it. When Dumbledore came to visit Sirius could not look him in the eye. His skin crawled. Here was the arbiter of his present fate, who had written history to bring him here, who found some fucking way to foil Sirius whenever he got his fingernails back under the lid of the truth again and started lifting — 

\--

When Sirius had not heard back from Dumbledore for a week he waited until Remus went down to the village to buy a Muggle paper (the _Prophet_ had reported a bombing in Kensington, and wizarding conspiracy radio had hosted several callers who claimed to have seen the Dark Mark above the burnt-out rowhouse, but Remus liked to corroborate with a Muggle source and there was nothing on TV) and he owled Buford van Clement with a request to take part in the trials. 

First he was sent by owl a magically resonant artifact (under, he noted, quite lax regulations, given it seemed relatively ancient and was certainly valuable), a tiny pale dog meticulously carven of antler or bone, which he was instructed to hold whilst he tried to perform three spells. He waited at the table staring blankly at his notes from Eynhallow until he was sure Remus had fallen asleep, feeling somewhere somehow altogether beyond stupid. If Remus found out what he was doing, he reasoned, the best that could happen was that they would have another knock-down drag-out fight like they had in ’78. The worst would be if Remus knew and didn’t stop him, which would corroborate all his sleepless panics that Remus thought him altogether completely fucking useless. 

He remembered Remus’s parents had taken him at age five to a collection of witch doctors and scam artists throughout Europe, all claiming they could cure lycanthropy with everything ranging from ancient ritual to Muggle science. It had been out of love, but also fear. Remus had long since forgiven them for it but understood what it symbolized. They would be searching the rest of their lives for the child of him who even by then did not — could not — exist without the other. They had never been able to accept the reality of the situation, for better or worse. 

Perhaps it was only a dearly wishful thinking rather like the Lupins’ but when it came to his own case Sirius refused to believe it was not possible. It could not so simply and quickly be gone. Not when it had left and come back so many times before. Not when he had felt a split second’s resonance with Remus at the henge. Not now, not in this war, not when he desperately needed to be a wizard. 

He collected a few kitchen items into a still life array, picked up his wand again for the first time in months, held the carven dog in his free hand, and tried — “ _Bullio! Ignis! Wingardium leviosa!_ ” 

Certainly he should have expected nothing, and indeed there was nothing. He went outside and breathed deeply the night air until he no longer felt like weeping, or screaming. Then he woke up his very irked owl and packaged up the artifact again and sent back with it another letter to Buford — _No success. Would like to try my next option_. 

\--

Next was magical immersion therapy, a “highly experimental treatment” Sirius tried surreptitiously to read up on before his appointment with little success. Buford had sent him a Portkey that would bring him directly to Cambridge, accompanied by a letter containing its specific departure time. When the day came Sirius made an excuse about needing a walk and wandered far out on the headland through the knee-high snow for a while, miserable and freezing, until the Portkey seized him. 

This facility was rather nicer than the Ministry’s on the coast had been; the office where Sirius waited was wallpapered with motivational posters both magic and Muggle: the same happy couple working together over a cauldron from the pamphlet Buford had given Sirius in the hospital, hung next to an image of ecstatic faces on a football field, emblazoned with _You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take!_

The doctors and nurses and researchers were very friendly and warm but Sirius felt rather helpless and manhandled like a baby bird that had fallen from its nest. They had him put on a hospital gown and took assorted measurements and temperatures many of which seemed purely excessive and then they herded him into a chamber like a Muggle tanning bed or MRI at which at least ten of them subsequently began firing assorted spells which seemed to stretch elastically over the surface of the machine. Sirius could see the magic, the color was apparent, and sometimes the warmth was, but all of it was vaguely nauseating (the faces of the doctors and nurses bathed in reflective neon) and after a while he closed his eyes. The spells, blurring together, he hadn’t heard before. All the spellworkers seemed to be moving in a kind of fugue or round through the same series of incantations, an ancient sort of trick, Sirius remembered, from the famous spell history of assorted resonant places. In ancient times it would have been a song beginning and culminating with bookends performed ensemble. And of course in those days the spellwords were different, and the performance; likely there would have been no wands. He wondered if it would have been performed as such on Eynhallow. If they had had perhaps another three months for research he would’ve known for sure… 

When it was over they helped him from the machine; he felt like a science fiction humanoid born from a mechanical egg, and the memory of the spells still fireworked behind his eyelids. Even as they brought a wand for him to use and a list of incantations to try he knew it would not work. 

He would feel it and know it for certain when it came back — he would recognize the golden thread that possessed his blood and the feeling of the dog like a shadow just behind him. It had been excised like a diseased limb and it remained as such and unlike an actual amputee he could feel no phantom sensation where it had once been. 

The Portkey took him back to the path on the headland where he’d come from. By his watch he had only been gone an hour and a half. Remus was at the table in the kitchen with a cup of hot chocolate reading through pages and pages of runic spell history; Sirius struggled his sodden boots off, left them by the woodstove, and went to change his wet clothes. From the other room he heard Remus cast a drying spell he likely meant to be surreptitious. He sat on the bed and watched out the window — another storm was coming in, over the sea — until he thought he could go into the kitchen without confessing everything. 

\--

Buford and his fellow researchers sent the potion next, bottled in a cobalt glass jar and sealed with magic to keep it from spilling during the long flight via owl from Cambridge. It came with a sheet of instructions, and a second cobalt glass jar containing what the enclosed letter called an antithetical potion. 

_Though the Chance-Carpenter Potion is completely safe and made entirely of harmless ingredients,_ Sirius read, _adverse reactions have been recorded in trials_ , _due to allergies, or particularly virulent forms of magic loss in which the body rejects all magical material. Since you have used Portkeys and side-along Apparition, it is likely you will not be affected as such. Still, it is our policy to always include the antithetical potion in every trial scenario, in the case of an adverse reaction. If you feel lightheaded, dizzy, nauseous, confused, overly cold, overly warm, suddenly angry, or suddenly giddy upon consumption of the Chance-Carpenter Potion, please don’t delay in taking the antithetical potion. With a central brew of charcoal, bezoars, and chocolate, it is immediately effective in stopping most adverse reactions in their tracks_. 

_Many test subjects have reported a tingling in their fingers as the first clue that the Chance-Carpenter Potion was successful in restoring some magical ability. Four to six hours after consuming the potion, you may achieve some success in casting a few rudimentary spells. However, in 85% of successful cases, subjects’ best magical performance occurred ten to twelve hours after consumption of the potion._

When he had finished reading the letter he burned it, then he stared at the ingredients list ( _Enclosed as part of our commitment to transparency with our test subjects!_ ) for a good ten minutes, not understanding much of it at all, then he hid both cobalt bottles in a place where Remus would never find them — on the shelf bursting with books and records behind all Sirius’s old Quidditch memorabilia — and waited, biding his time, chewing his nails, reading old notes for no reason at all, for Remus to Apparate to Indra’s on the night of the full moon. 

He wished it didn’t have to be that way but there was no alternative. There was no basement or bunker for Remus to transform in on Meayll Hill and Dumbledore had offered to look into his Manx “connections” to ask about a friendly dungeon or root cellar among the island’s wizarding community, but the prospect hadn’t exactly been appealing. As such Remus had written the old man and asked for a course of Wolfsbane; Sirius intercepted the package whilst Remus was out at the henge (he wouldn’t’ve touched it if it hadn’t clinked) and poured it all down the sink; the rest was history. 

The day of the full moon Remus slept in, and Sirius made breakfast; they ate at noon in silence, and they kissed goodbye on the threshold as though Remus were departing for battle or a sea voyage, and he could see in Remus’s eyes that he wanted to say something, and they were standing so very close together and it was not yet snowing but soon it would, but at last Remus tore away, like a bandage, shoulders hunched in pain and something else, and walked out toward the heelstone, where he disappeared. 

Sirius went inside and locked the door and poured a tumbler of scotch, unearthed the potions from the behind the Quidditch books on the shelf, and carried everything in stages into the bathroom in case he puked, which seemed likely based on the smell of the stuff. It was astringent and dry, like witch hazel with the eye-watering fumes of rubbing alcohol. 

It was different than Remus and the Wolfsbane, he told himself, staring at his reflection: unslept, unshaven, and he had unbothered to cut his hair. He looked exhausted, which he was, and terrified, which he was, and pathetic, which he was. But of course it was different. Altogether it was entirely different because — 

He could not think of an excuse that was satisfactory enough and as such he tossed back first the scotch then the jar of Chance-Carpenter Potion entirely, trying to summon back the elusive skill he’d perfected in his hardest-drinking days (an abstract calendar spanning scattered periods, from January 1979 through late 1985) where whatever you were chugging didn’t touch your tongue. When he’d gotten it down he covered his mouth and heaved. Once, twice, thrice, until suddenly, somehow, entirely without realizing it, he found himself on the floor. His knees had given out, he realized after an indeterminable while. Sitting upon the tile, with his burning forehead pressed against the toilet bowl, he remembered, in a sort of cheery mental narration which might’ve belonged to a Muggle TV nurse of his memory, ought you to drink the antithetical potion? 

He did, though he struggled to get the cap off, because his vision was swimming and his hands felt heavy, not so much numb as over-feeling, and this time when he heaved it all came up, and it was black. A pure sucking lightless black as the space between stars. A kind of symbolic thing to come out of himself, he thought — such a pure and vivid aching void. 

Whatever it was did not fit inside him anymore. There was no more space for it because it had rid itself violently. It had salted the earth where it had once been and it had filled its vacancy with concrete. Whatever he tried to do to bring it back would only be turned back upon him to gouge him deeper. _Virulent_ , he remembered, from the letter, a kind of searing neon inside his own mind. Even more than that it felt vengeful… 

At last he lay down. Please come back, he thought, desperately, I can’t, I can’t do it without you, please come back and pull me out of this. Just before it all left him he thought he wasn’t sure whether he was thinking of his magic or of Remus. 

\--

He couldn’t be sure how long it had been but it seemed his eyes were opened and his brain switched back on rather forcibly to the sight of Remus looking extremely grim as he Vanished all the sick from Sirius’s clothes and the floor. In one hand he had crumpled the letter and the list of ingredients Sirius had been sent by the Cambridge researchers; in the other he held Sirius’s wand, which was shaking infinitesimally in his trembling hand. 

“I knew you were going to do something fucking stupid,” Remus said. His voice was hoarse with the moon but did not waver. “Come on and get up.” 

“Moony,” he tried, his voice hardly — everything swum. Remus’s eyes were bright with pain and he was very pale and by the light through the tiny window above the toilet it must have been an hour past dawn. “I can’t — ”

“ _Energia_ ,” Remus said, wand angled squarely at Sirius’s chest. It felt suddenly as though he’d done a line of coke and/or had seven espresso shots on top of the weakness and the nausea and he half-rolled to his side to vomit just at the shock of it but Remus stopped him. “Come on. You’ve poisoned yourself. There was too much nightshade in that potion for you to digest without magic. You need to make an antidote.” 

“I can’t — ”

“If you say that again I will fucking hex you.” 

He helped Sirius gingerly to his feet and then into the kitchen. His boots, Sirius noted, were still on; he had tracked gravel and snow inside which melted in dirty puddles against the grimy tiles. He nearly collapsed in one of the chairs whilst Remus dug the potions supply kit and the cauldron out from under the sink. He deposited them both in front of Sirius with what seemed unnecessary loudness. “What am I supposed to — ” 

Remus crouched to open the kit and Sirius had to turn away at the smell of everything in it. “You remember how to make a general antidotal potion don’t you?” 

“Of course I — ” 

He put Sirius’s wand back in his hand and had to forcibly close his fingers around it. “Do it. Come on.” 

It was the first potion they had ever made on their first day in the potions dungeon at Hogwarts when they were eleven years old. It had been designed to be so simple it could be made within enough time to save your own life from at least seventy percent of known poisons, including accidentally administered ones, like Muggle household cleaners or deadly botched brews. Sirius himself had learned the potion when he was about seven from the nanny who had doubled then as his brother’s nurse in the years when he was very sickly and the potions given him by the doctors would sometimes do more harm than good. 

Charcoal, kelp, dittany for the base. Perhaps this was why, Sirius realized dimly, Remus had been collecting and saving kelp from the beach and charcoal from the stove. The rest of it was supposed to match your symptoms. Ginger for nausea, gooseberries and honey for muscle weakness, St. John’s wort for confusion… whatever milk you had on hand would congeal it, and there was a pint of goat’s milk in the fridge Remus fetched for him. Then the stirring, with one’s wand, thrice counterclockwise and twice clockwise, and a runic sketch to seal the deal, though Sirius knew many potionmakers dismissed it as superstition. He drew Jera, for peace and rewards. It was rather wishful thinking but the nanny had always sealed the potion as such and it had always worked. Though of course it could only be done with magic. His wand felt like nothing in his hand — like a stick, or a wooden spoon. No current. Already the shock of energy Remus had given him was wearing off, and stirring the sludgy and colorless liquid was almost hypnotic. 

Remus pressed one of their chipped thrift store coffee mugs into his hand. _I’d Rather Be Golfing!_ it said. He dipped it into the cauldron and filled it to the brim and drank, stomach churning, forcing himself to swallow every drop, eyes squeezing shut, and when at last he had drained the mug he held his hand tightly over his mouth certain he would puke it all back up and prove himself incontrovertibly, utterly useless, worse than a squib, a scraped-raw shell of what he should be, what he needed to be — 

Instead of course it worked. As all the lightheaded nauseating blur faded something else regained painful focus. Remus had pursed his lips so tightly they appeared colorless. He stood, knees cracking, hurting, and Sirius reached for him desperately like a child, pulled him stumblingly close. Pressed his face into Remus’s belly and wept. Remus’s hands were cold against the back of his neck. He was crying too, Sirius realized after a while, but he was trying to be surreptitious about it. 

\--

When he woke the next morning Remus was holding him so tightly he couldn’t move. At first he thought Remus was still asleep but he wasn’t. 

\--

Owls came from Buford and the other Cambridge researchers asking about the success of the trial, and Sirius burned them in the woodstove. He practiced potions and found he could still make successfully about two thirds of the brews in his school textbook (he had saved it, all these years, for reference, and also because there were salacious notes from Remus and James and even Peter scrawled in the margins). He and Remus wandered on the tarn together in the snow collecting ingredients — the eggs of strange birds, and the roots of hibernating plants, scrapes of lichen from the granite ridges — and while Remus worked at the henge Sirius brewed esoteric elixirs out of a home-photocopied recipe book he’d found at the local magic shop, _Strange Brews: Manx History in Local Potions._

In a flurry of fresh snow, two weeks after, the sky looming heavy grey gloaming despite the approaching Spring, he brought a homemade pepper-up potion out to Remus at the henge, where he sat unmoving like a statue by the heelstone. The week previous he had completed the full spell history to approximately 3600 BC (intriguingly, they had noted, before the construction of the monument) and as such he was diving in to try and map it before he read the terramancy. His hands were pressed tightly to the earth and a few of them were blue-white with cold but he was in so deep he likely didn’t feel it. 

When he touched Remus’s knee to pull him out he felt the same sudden jumping thread of gold lacing between them as if delivered through a conduit or intravenous needle, a sudden bolt of lightning. It was hollow inside and he could feel its depth as though suddenly the fabric and substance of the earth had opened under him. Then Remus opened his eyes, blinking to focus, and the feeling was gone. 

Sirius pressed the cup of potion into Remus’s frozen hands. The steam that rose from his ears when he drank it was almost artfully delicate and the falling-off thing behind his eyes seemed to go somewhere else now, somewhere deep and rich and centered, somewhere almost integrally present. “I’m making tomato soup and grilled cheese for dinner,” Sirius told him, inanely. 

“Well I demand a roast chicken,” Remus said, smiling, “and a full Christmas spread.” 

“I thought you said I was a hopeless cook.” 

“That was meant to be motivational so that you might get better. There are all sorts of funny cookbooks at the thrift shop in town.” 

Sirius had combed through a few of them once with a sensation of rapidly rising nausea and complete mystification. “I will make aspics and Muggle mayonnaise salads for you over my own dead body.” 

Remus laughed. “Well, I think after your stunt two weeks ago you owe me at least one of those tuna and jello pies.” 

“Oh my God,” said Sirius, “how can Muggles even — ”

“Don’t forget you grew up in a staunchly pureblood household eating questionably regulated bubotuber-stuffed dragon sausage and rare hippogriff steaks.” 

“Yes, right, with a side of manticore jelly and gillyweed liquor for an apertif. Who am I to judge?” 

Remus’s mouth twisted. “Gillyweed liquor…” 

“Yes, it was absolutely rank as I remember, like bad tequila but worse, and I’m certain it was hallucinogenic.” 

“It is hallucinogenic in high enough quantities,” Remus said, smiling in a corner of his mouth. “Some folks at Hogwarts whom I will not name would try to harvest it from the lake. If you recall.” 

He was speaking of James Potter whom in sixth year when he learned that Lily Evans had a nascent taste for drug experimentation thanks to her recent discovery of psychedelic rock had undertaken an endeavor to become similarly versed in tripping. Which Sirius knew for certain he had never achieved. This was, of course, the means by which Lily had talked James into licking a Paraguayan Spicy Slug in Care of Magical Creatures, which James had catalogued for the rest of his life as his most mortifying public humiliation, and which Lily had catalogued, for the rest of her life, as the moment in which she realized all of his macho bullshit was in fact a deeply insecure posturing. As such it was the moment in which she realized he wasn't in fact all that bad. 

There was almost enough magic in the memory of how hard he had laughed then a stupid wheezing laughter orchestrated throughout them all in unsymphonic tandem like the work of some experimental composer reaching and stretching into the broadening sky and the forest; it was springtime, and Remus had forgiven him, and he had left his family, and he was loved by his friends, and he had passed his O.W.L.’s, and he was happy. Even then of course the war was percolating like coffee on some removed horizon and when all was said and done he would be really truly happy perhaps for another eighteen months after that before things changed. But time moved onward, he understood now, and it was circular and cyclical, it came back even if it came back changed, like the moon, or the tide. 

“Remus,” he said, “can you help me — can we try something?” 

“Of course.” His brow furrowed. “What is it?” 

“I think I felt — well, I’ll tell you after if it works. Can you go under again and — when I touch you, this time, don’t come up.” 

“Sure, um, I won’t go all that deep. Maybe just a thousand years or so. Okay?” 

Remus pressed the heels of his hands flat against the ground again and Sirius watched his eyelids crease as he reached under. His jaw relaxed and his brow — he looked like some legendary character from an Attic tragedy carven or frozen in meditation and Sirius loved him. Wanted — yearned, even — to kiss the joint of scars and bones at his neck and jaw visible above the collar of his coat and his wool scarf like edges of some other fabric. If it was a map to somewhere it was a map to this place. To the bluff and the henge and the sea — where at last they had come around after everything to some truth as yet not fully elucidated. But if there was some veil that still needed lifting they had only ever accomplished such a thing together. 

He clasped the soft ragged denim round of Remus’s knee and closed his eyes. 


	14. Chapter 14

He was out at the henge having a cigarette when the owl came with the letter from Indra. 

_Had a dream. Can you come to Doncaster late afternoon of March 16 for full moon?_

It was the eleventh, presently, and the night previous it had snowed, just a dusting upon the bare ground. The day previous he had turned thirty-five. He had woken with dreams and gone to the stone circle with his jar of bluebell flames to read terramancy until dawn amidst the flurries swirling on their windless gyre. Deep in the trance of it he had found a few days previous some of the ghosts of that place who would not speak to him nor really show themselves but watched. Sometimes it seemed to him they were taking bets on how long he would last alone in the room with them — he had not yet dared to bring Sirius down with him so deep, because his grasp on the whole endeavor was admittedly miraculous and most of all still tenuous. They — twelve of them — had been buried at the site near its construction, sometime in the vicinity of 3500 BC, according to the prevailing literature, mostly decades-old dissertations which had been owled to Remus after a cleverly forged request to the Department at St. Andrews’. He was certain one of the ghosts had died of magic shock, judging from her demeanor and the ceremonial items she had been buried with. 

_He’s encamped with a pack in Nether Haugh_ , the letter continued. _Latest reports of bites have been from Sheffield, February and December fulls._

_I’ll await your owl — Indra_

He tore the blank piece off the bottom of Indra’s parchment and grabbed the quill from the Silcox setup he kept by the henge enveloped in Impenetrable and Disillusionment charms against the elements and Muggle visitors, and hardly thinking he scrawled — _YES_. Underlined it twice. Bound it to the shaking leg of Indra’s owl and sent it off again into the haze. 

Finished the cigarette. Reached for the ghosts like a cloud of gnats hovering just belowground as if seeking their approval before he had really even fully processed what he had just done.

\--

It wasn’t as if Sirius did not know he would go after Greyback at the drop of a hat if given the chance. Sirius knew what had happened at the facility because Remus had told him in the hospital, and weeks later while they lay in bed admittedly after an evening of drinking whilst watching dismal reportage on the Muggle news: twenty-four killed in a rail bridge collapse in London. Remus had explained that it was only a matter of time before he had another dream and when he had another dream he intended to follow it, and Sirius said, only promise you’ll tell me, and he had promised. 

Now he was not sure he would keep it. He knew Sirius would talk him out of it and perhaps he would be right to do so. 

\--

Time since their arrival seemed to have sped up its motion slowly like a volcanic eruption or Rimsky-Korsakov’s _Scheherazade_. In the early days of the winter they argued and didn’t sleep, and Sirius was bitter and fragile in the way he usually was after something was taken from him, and their sex seemed distant, like they were each coming at it from different dimensions. Yet they sat together every day on the moldy couch and listened to Bowie’s _Low_ , and _London Calling_ , and then to _Exile on Main Street_ , and Remus remembered listening to it in their Hogwarts dormitory, ’72; Sirius at the time was fond of saying the Stones had saved his life, and claimed he had snuck out of Grimmauld Place in the middle of the night at age ten to purchase _Beggars’ Banquet_. Later Remus learned it had in fact been brought to him at an otherwise stuffy dinner party by his Uncle Alphard who saw rock and roll as the sole methodology by which he could liberate his nephew from a life of inbreeding, face-powdering, and blood purism without being himself cut out of an inheritance. Remus had always imagined Sirius the way he looked first year at Hogwarts which was very young and haughty and buttoned-up neatly with his hair cut like a mod girl’s in the wizarding style of the mid-nineteenth century, watching wide-eyed at the record as it spun “Sympathy for the Devil” around the needle. It had probably been the first time he had conceptualized the world outside was worth anything at all. “Let me please introduce myself — I’m a man of wealth and taste — ”

He had brought Sirius's records from Hogwarts to the trailer at Meayll Hill before they had moved in, and in the interim months Sirius had chased down the ones that Harry had borrowed. They sat together and listened to _Psychocandy, Power Corruption & Lies, Loveless_ and _Alien Lanes_ , _Slanted and Enchanted_ and _Crooked Rain_ and _Fables of the Reconstruction_ , every record released in the ‘80s by Kate Bush and Talking Heads and David Bowie and of course the Stones, the complete discographies of Nirvana and the Breeders and Slint and Sonic Youth, to the Smiths, whom Sirius claimed he hated but didn’t want Remus to write off. They listened to the Clean and the Pixies and Polvo and U.S. Maple and PJ Harvey and they broke out some of their old records, and Remus’s mother’s Patsy Cline LPs, and got stoned and fucked on the couch to _Station to Station_ and _Here Come the Warm Jets_ and _Led Zeppelin 4_ , and ignored the paper when it was delivered, and did not respond to Dumbledore’s letters (more than once Remus burned them after only a cursory read), and they did not speak in much detail about the night at the facility, nor about magic in theory or practice, nor about what Remus was doing at the henge, nor about what Sirius was doing in the house. 

In December he had written to Dumbledore and asked for a course of Wolfsbane which was provided (Remus did not read the lengthy letter that came with) but Sirius intercepted the bottles and emptied them in the sink. It was getting to be Christmastime and Remus had gone to the dollar store in town gleeful to show his face in public and had bought for Sirius a novelty mug and oversize fisherman’s jumper and several very old vinyl records and a dog-eared Muggle book of Native American symbology. Then he had gone by the supermarket and bought fixings for hot chocolate — heavy cream and chili and cinnamon — and cigarettes and assorted cheeses and a bottle of scotch; he’d wrapped the gifts in old pages of the _Prophet_ , and he had thought it would be perhaps an early Christmas gift that when the full moon came he could quite simply curl up with Sirius on the couch the way Sirius often as a dog had curled up with him on the couch in the flat in Chalk Farm. 

Instead he watched the thick muddy soup of it spiral slowly down the sink’s slow drain. “Sirius,” he said, measuredly. 

“I know you prefer not to — I don’t want you to take that stuff for me.” 

“It isn’t just for you,” Remus said, but he was lying, and Sirius could tell. “I want to be with you.” 

“You are with me,” Sirius told him, but he looked down. In the sink it looked like vomit or worse and the sight alone of it (and the ghost of the smell, serpentine in the still room) turned Remus’s stomach. “Aren’t you?”

Thence had come the Event of February. A few days after it happened he had a cigarette on the stoop at dawn in a transient flurry of snow and thought perhaps his whole life was and had always been soundtracked by “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” But if you try sometimes you just might find, etc. He was getting better at remembering things like names and spells and potions recipes and he had fewer bad dreams and Sirius’s wand seemed to have almost thoroughly resigned itself to his using it. Yet it was the nature of the beast, by which he meant the war, and, he supposed, also their relationship, that they seemed to trade off devastations. It had been Remus’s turn to be helped for rather a long time and the upset was jarring, it seemed to Sirius most of all. He was not the kind of person who could be told things were alright, or that not much had changed, or that he was loved, or that he was safe, or free of it; he had to be shown, and anyway neither of them had ever really believed the last two. 

He got up and went inside and back into the bedroom where Sirius was almost awake blinking the pale rush of light from his eyes and he undressed and climbed again under the blankets and pressed close in the morning chill. If only it all were as easy as this. They both drifted, kissing, like between snatched fragments of dreams, he was running in the darkness, he was throwing himself against a stone wall, he was staring at the sea, they were kissing in the grass, he was drowning in the earth, and at last Sirius’s hands shifted to his waist, pulling his hips closer. In the dawn chill — the fire in the woodstove had gone out in the night — he had stripped naked except for his sweater. Sirius made a soft and sleepy sound, surprised and approving, against his mouth. 

Events progressed and finally after a confluence of what seemed like good ideas Remus lay on his back in the bed, having thrown off his sweater, knees folded up, opening himself with two fingers whilst Sirius watched, hand resting warm and callused against the joint of his hip and his belly, not so much holding him down as holding him steady. With his hair pulled messily off his face he looked like a bird of prey, Remus thought, half-deliriously, peaky and sharp about the nose and cheekbones, intent and hungry about the eyes… 

“I know you like it when I do this,” Remus told him, stating altogether the fucking obvious, “you like to watch.” 

“I guess,” said Sirius. If he was trying for a casual tone he had failed miserably. Carefully he pressed one of Remus’s knees back just enough to lift his ankle from the bed. He flexed his fingers deeper, wrist hurting; it wasn't so much uncomfortable as it was deeply awkward, but he supposed there was a price to pay, for Sirius to look at him like that, like Christmas dinner or like a run of gold. Like some very rare and valuable magical beast shifting in the wood at dusk. Like he had not in the last seventeen years been brutally mauled and chased and starved and tortured on some distant sea island and in his own mind. 

“What do you think you like about it?” 

“I don’t know,” Sirius lied. 

“Yes you do.” He could feel the small of his back lifting from the bed. “You only ever could’ve asked me.” That was another thing: whenever they talked about sex, which was rare, it functioned cleanly as a useful metonym for everything else, which they talked about even more rarely. “Why,” he asked, “come on.” 

“Well you look — you look good.” 

“Yeah?” 

“God, yeah.” Sirius touched the straining muscle in Remus’s sides and belly, a kind of memory-mapping gesture. His face was intent and almost fierce but his mouth was open and very soft. “And you look — I don’t know. Like I have to prove to you that you need me.” 

“You know your territorial bullshit always got me hot.” 

“Yes, well, it always got me laid, so.” 

He laughed and Sirius smiled, sharp and nearly predatory, and the hand against-inside his thigh slipped lower and at last Sirius’s finger pressed inside him and curled against his own (he was not sure why this felt so particularly intimate) and pushed up, hard. Something burst behind his eyes. A word escaped him, which was, “Fuck.” 

“What’s that?” 

His ears were ringing. Sirius, of course, did it again; this time the sound he made constituted no words at all. It felt almost lecherous even to hear it from his own mouth. 

“I didn’t, Remus,” Sirius whispered, mouth, God, so close — against his neck and jaw. Pressed against the pulse in the thrumming liquid vein. “I didn’t hear what you said.” 

I do need you, he was trying to say, with everything except his voice. Perhaps he should have dared. I do need you, God, I need you, I needed you when I thought — I hated myself for needing you. I need you more than ever now. Don’t you fucking get it? 

Their fucking when they at last got around to it was slow but uncareful in the pale brush of the early daylight; he had already come once, maybe twice, he’d lost count, or forgotten, and Sirius looked rather feral and almost smugly accomplished, one of his most annoying habits, which anyway Remus loved him for, and he took Sirius’s hair down from where he’d tied it up, felt it brush his skin, like a seabreeze. He was watching Sirius’s face, which was uncomposed and wild with illegible emotion, and Sirius was watching intently the join of their bodies, as if reading some lost language inscribed in runes, their bones, their blood and scars, vacancy and fulfillment, the giving and the taking away — 

Sirius came before Remus did and subsequently tried valiantly to dismantle him completely, which he probably thought was chivalrous. 

\--

When he went inside from the henge Sirius was at the table with a cup of hot chocolate combing through one of the more esoteric magical theory tracts he’d had shipped from the library at St. Andrews’. They both were trying to surreptitiously uncover how this thing that was happening was possible and subsequently if it would be possible anywhere else. Sirius could feel resonance again — through he had just five months ago been confirmed enough of a squib to receive Ministry benefits — but he could only do it if certain conditions were met. Namely, if they were sitting at the henge together close enough to touch. Perhaps it was something about the resonance and history of this place itself, Remus thought while he laid awake at night, because they had not yet attempted to try it somewhere else. Sirius wanted to try drawing from it to cast spells — to put the dog on again, he had suggested — but Remus said they should move slowly. He had been reading in secret about severe magic shock cases and what sort of magical therapy was undertaken afterward by those who could afford it. He was nervous about what they would learn from testing any of the various hypotheses and he could tell Sirius was too; he did not want to discover the inevitable limits existing upon what remained of his magical ability. Remus himself couldn’t decide how he felt about being a sort of conduit, as it almost seemed to prove he was truly hollow, like a strand of copper wire, like at the heart of him he still had not grown back what had been scraped from his very marrow in that place, and now he sought these things that could flow through him, but they were transient in their very definition. And yet as always he remembered dancing with Sirius that night in ’78 tripping fuck to _Lust for Life_ feeling resonance strung between them like a wreath of fairy lights, and he thought perhaps there had always been something. Sometimes it seemed almost too pretty to think and other times it seemed like the only true thing that had ever been. 

He stomped the snow off his boots, and Sirius looked up. “Any findings?” Remus asked. Indra’s letter he had folded tightly in his inside coat pocket. Perhaps, he thought suddenly, he should have burned it.

Sirius had scrawled a largely illegible page of notes he showed to Remus. “There’s a tiny piece in here — like a part of a chapter — about magic sharing through resonance. But it’s not very detailed. And the writer posits it as a sort of ancient means of ritual performance… she says she doubts it could be used today with Latinized magic.” 

“It doesn’t feel like sharing,” Remus said, “from my end, it just feels like, like you’re sort of reaching through me.” 

“You must know sometimes it sounds deeply erotic when you talk about it,” Sirius said, smiling in a corner of his mouth. 

“Yes, well, that’s on purpose.” 

He wondered not for the first time if Dumbledore had known something like this would happen when he had procured the research grant. Certainly he had known that one of the tombs at the site housed a witch who had died of magic shock; several St. Andrews’ researchers had written on her life and death as they could be reconstructed from the spell history and from the chamber of her burial. She might’ve been a witch in the contemporary imagination in that it was likely she could perform magic — certainly instinctively, and perhaps otherwise — away from resonant places, and as such she would have been called upon by her clan to direct and orchestrate community ritual. And on the day of her death she would have attempted some kind of channeling or conducting that would have been too much for her body to bear. It would have been some massive performance as yet uncertain, as suggested by her burial in the chamber toward the heelstone. It was likely the henge itself had been built specifically as a monument to her death and as such perhaps a warning. She was younger than Remus was when she had died and her ghost was the shyest. 

In whatever had happened to her was perhaps some solution to their current situation but going through the spell history rune by rune with a dictionary that translated every sixth inscription at best meant the complete endeavor was slow going. 

“Want a bit of hot chocolate,” Sirius asked, standing, going to the stove. Remus had been staring at page 542 of the dictionary for a good five minutes trying to make his brain stick on this problem instead of the other. Indra’s letter in his pocket felt almost warm, like a Howler, or a charm. “There’s scotch in it,” Sirius said. 

\--

Indra’s owl arrived again the next day. _I’m not taking Wolfsbane,_ she had written, _I don’t want to remember any of it, I don’t think you do either, but I wanted to let you know. I don’t know what to tell Keith. I just wrote him a big long letter and hid it in my jewelry box ie. somewhere I know he’ll only go if I die._

_In better news the Hogwarts board voted yesterday overwhelmingly to integrate the school. It’s not yet public because as you can imagine there’s quite a bit of political massaging that needs to be done in the interim. But Coll School will close at the end of this year. Dumbledore offered me a job teaching magical theory but I’ve got to say after what happened between him and you all I’m still mulling it over. Maybe you can help me decide one way or the other. I suppose I should talk to Sirius about it as he used to have the job. Say if we survive this you both should come over for dinner. Perhaps in May when the weather becomes at all palatable for either of us. Keith’s dad’s given us this wild Muggle grill which I find utterly hilarious._

_See you on the 16th. I’ve bought our train tickets from Doncaster to Fort William and from Fort William to Cambridge. So you owe me twenty quid. — Indra_

His head felt buzzing; it was the moon coming, and the rising sick feeling of it, what he would have to do, and that he desperately wanted to do it, and that perhaps he wouldn’t survive it, and that who was he to do such a thing to Sirius after everything? If this killed him it would kill Sirius — gone would be his only proven possible chance of ever doing magic again. How much havoc had he wrought, he wondered, how much chaos had he orchestrated, simply because he could never let any of it go? He had been trying since 1978, he had been trying since 1965, to shed the memory and the possession of it like a snakeskin; perhaps it would have been manageable if he didn’t have to snap his own bones physically into its resurgent cyclical wash once every four weeks. 

It would be selfish to undertake such a risk to kill Greyback but it would not be selfish alone. The Order and the Auror Department had tried so many times to destroy him to no avail and it stood to reason that if Voldemort’s most loyal (and vocal) werewolf ally were eliminated it would be easier to recruit more part-humans to oppose his Death Eaters. 

Besides it would never be over unless he ended it himself. Thirteen years having his face rubbed in it had forced him to learn it. 

He poked his head in the door and told Sirius he was walking to town to the grocery store, and then he shut the door again quickly before Sirius could ask to come with. It was sunnyish for the first day in as long as he could remember and he squinted in the light off the snow and the sea beneath the bluff. What if it didn’t work, he thought suddenly, what if it changed nothing, what if it meant nothing? He had paid such credence for so many years to a children’s story connected to a mythos with no proven basis in factual magic. Yet he remembered the scholar Kateb on Amelia’s radio show months previous speaking about the earliest lycanthropic evidence in Britain buried on Ben Nevis dating from 3800 BC. Could legend exist so long without some truth to it? Even if so much history and magic had been lost in the interim? 

What would it feel like to be free, he wondered. His boots scrabbled on the bare scrape of rock. Certainly it would not erase the condition nor the memory. The yoke it might lift he thought he had carried so long he had grown accustomed to the weight of it. He might not even notice if it were lifted. Though he recalled at first he had thought the same would be true of leaving Azkaban, and indeed for a while it had felt like nothing much had changed. Until he opened his eyes one day, and he wasn’t afraid, and the breeze felt cool and smelled like earth, and he realized he was breathing. 

It was another station on the grand hypnotic loop. It had carried him on whatever fated current around to Greyback in ’65, ’78, and ’94, and each time it had set up some grand ruination of himself and everything which had subsequently been actualized with varying degrees of success. It would loop around again someday and who knew what else it would bring when it did. Perhaps the next time it would truly destroy him. Unless he closed it now. Unless he sealed and locked at last the door… 

In town he went to the dive bar and got a beer and a table in the back corner and he asked the bartender for some paper and a pen. For an hour or so he wrote a letter so long and painful it felt at the last as though he were eking the dregs of his blood or guts out onto the page for ink. Mostly it was a very long and stupid apology, for every promise he had broken and every cruel thing he had ever said and every lie he had ever told, and it was a kind of hopeless endearment for forgiveness, and a very glaring neon admission of Love, et cetera. He hoped very much that Sirius would never read it. 

He wouldn’t read it, Remus reminded himself, unless this didn’t work, which it would, which it had to. And if it didn’t work he wouldn’t be alive to be embarrassed. 

He folded the letter and tucked it in his inside coat pocket and went to the grocery store where he bought several varied cheeses after standing in front of the case staring into space until an old lady bumped him, not accidentally, with her cart. Then he went to the magic shop and bought an nth runic dictionary, and at last he walked back up the hill to the henge and the trailer. Over the sea the clouds had begun to stretch together like distant smoke, and inside Sirius had abandoned all his work in favor of kneading some unidentifiable dough on the kitchen table. He had managed to cover at least one third of himself in flour and it was also on his face and in his hair. “Took you long enough,” he said. 

“What in heaven’s name are you doing.” 

“Making shortbread cookies because we ran out. And I forgot to ask you to buy more.” 

He had opened up on the table in front of him Remus’s mother’s ancient dog-eared copy of _100 Muggle Recipes for the Savvy Witch_. 

“I couldn’t decide,” Remus told him, head spinning, feeling like a fucking idiot, overwhelmed with it all, with love, he supposed, “I couldn’t pick, you know, between all the different cheeses.” 

While Sirius rolled out the dough and cut it with a glass and knelt on the floor to watch it bake in the Muggle oven with an endearing fascination Remus went over the spell history with the new dictionary to keep his mind from other pressing matters. He must have been slouching so atrociously that Sirius came over after a while to rub his back, which devolved, and one batch of the shortbread burned so atrociously it set off the fire alarm. They made grilled cheeses for dinner and ate on the couch watching the Muggle seven o’clock news, and then Sirius put a record on — one of their old records, _Gyrate_ by Pylon — and took him to bed. It felt wrong to call it fucking; he was sitting up in Sirius’s lap, and his hands were at Sirius’s jaw, the soft pieces of his neck, feeling in his thumbs the heartbeat, and the corner of Sirius’s open mouth, feeling every shred of the unspoken. Every secret he had ever kept was scrawled out all over his body and Sirius read it like a lost diary. At the last Sirius sunk his fucking teeth into the old scar at Remus’s neck and Remus clasped his shoulders desperately, mouth open and soundless, so shocked by it that the swarming rush of his orgasm (immediately subsequent) seemed like a sort of afterthought. 

They lay together for a while in the moonlight and when he could tell for certain that Sirius was asleep he went to the coat rack in the kitchen and took the letter he had written earlier at the bar from the inside pocket. In their bedroom he hid it in his topmost dresser drawer with his best wool socks. He had written Sirius’s name in big block letters on the outermost fold. 

“Moony,” said Sirius from the bed; his voice was soft with sleep, and his eyes were almost closed. 

“Here,” he said. “I’m here. It’s nothing.”

He lay back down and let Sirius hold him. The ponderous sleeping breath against his shoulder. He closed his eyes and the moonlight through the window imprinted on the darkness. It took him a while to fall asleep. 

\--

On the day of the full moon he lay in bed feigning sleep until Sirius started whistling loudly in the kitchen and making much unnecessary noise whilst frying bacon and he took it for a sort of ruse. They ate at the kitchen table and Sirius started reading another obscure dissertation about resonance and magic sharing and Remus attempted more translation with the new dictionary, which was proving more effective than the last. He thought it was likely he’d pinpointed the spell performance whose execution had killed the shyest ghost but it was a series of complicated riddles and as such translation was slow going. Just past noon they went out to the henge and Sirius came with Remus into the resonance and they went deep enough into history that he could feel her presence. When they came out Sirius’s cheeks were flushed; he asked, almost before his eyes had even focused, “Who was that woman?” 

He said he had seen her face, which Remus yet had not. “She died here,” Remus told him, not wanting to elaborate. “Before the henge was even built.” 

“Suggests the resonance came before the construction, then,” Sirius said, and he stood quickly, but he had to help Remus to his feet. His knees made a violent sound like very close thunder. “You do know that’s a huge debate in the community,” he continued as they went back inside. “Rather the ultimate chicken or egg debate of the magical theory world… but I’ve long thought, you know, the henges are only resonant themselves through a sort of transubstantiation…” 

He began to make notes on it as soon as they got back inside. Remus passed him the milk crate containing all the writing on the site that had been shipped from St. Andrews’, which he doubted Sirius had read at all since their arrival. Then he went to the turntable and put _Crooked Rain_ on to calm himself down but it didn’t work. At the end of “Fillmore Jive” he had to go to the toilet to puke. 

“Their throats are filled with…” 

He splashed his face in the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. The bite Sirius had given him on top of Greyback’s old mark just four days ago was bruising reddish purple and sometimes when he turned his head just so it stung a little in a not unpleasant way. He had cut himself at the jaw shaving his face the other morning, and he needed a haircut, and his eyes were big with worry and a vivid unslept red. 

Tired — he was so tired. 

In the living room Sirius flipped the record and started it over again from the beginning. Then he knocked upon the bathroom door. “Alright, Moony?” 

“Yes, it’s — ” Sirius’s face was very close when he opened the door and his brow was furrowed in a familiar concern. His heart slammed and plummeted somewhere lost inside him. “You know. It’s just, I ought to be going.” 

“Alright,” Sirius said. He was jealous and he was trying to tamp it down, but it was in his face. He was jealous every time but he pretended he wasn’t. After this, Remus thought, wished he could say, after this I will take Wolfsbane every full moon, no matter your fucking self-righteous protestations, so I can be with you. After this. They went together to the kitchen and Sirius helped Remus into his coat. All his bones already were beginning to feel wrong. “See you tomorrow,” Sirius said. 

He ducked in and kissed Remus’s cheek and then his still and unmoving mouth, and Remus embraced him, as tightly as he could stand, pressing his nose into his neck. It would not — no matter what it would not be tomorrow. If — of course, _if —_ he ever came home across the same threshold again he would be changed. But he could not be certain yet how it would be. It was pretty to imagine it simply: perhaps he would stand taller. And there would be blood under his fingernails. And he would go to Sirius and be his alone. “Right,” he said, fighting his voice steady. He took a step back, almost painfully, out of Sirius’s embrace. “See you. I love you.” 

“I love you too.” 

Opening the door felt like some grand symbolic gesture. “So much,” he said. Sirius’s brow tightened, and Remus went on, tongue loosed, head spinning, feeling fucking crazy: “I love you so much.” 

“Remus,” Sirius started, treading carefully, “what — ” 

He took a step out toward the henge and pressed into space and Apparated before he could think twice about it. 

\--

Indra was waiting for him where she said she’d be, on the bridge over the River Don, just beyond the Doncaster Minister. Around her feet was an ecstasy of cigarette butts. She wore flat and sturdy boots and the well-worn clothes he’d only ever seen her in around her house but she had not decided against her ostentatious houndstooth overcoat complete with neon false fur, and she carried over one shoulder a fluorescent hiker’s backpack, which was empty. She had pulled her hair tightly back from her face and her eyes were cold as ice chips in the grey afternoon. 

“Hullo, Lupin,” Indra said, grinding out an nth cigarette beneath her toe. They climbed together under the bridge, watchful for Muggles. “I’ve got to Side-Along you,” she said, almost apologetic; her voice was hoarse and tight with nerves. “I couldn’t give you directions, I just sort of know the feeling of the place, and besides who knows if they’re even there anymore anyway — ” 

He held her wrist and felt her focus almost like reading an atlas of her mind and along they went. Even before he opened his eyes in that place — in the wet woods — he could tell indeed they had come where they were supposed to be. It thrummed like the ragged moon in his blood and the fist it wrapped around his heart and lungs squeezed ever tighter. Indra’s face was grim when he looked to her, and without a word exchanged between them she nodded. 

They walked out of the forest onto the street, thick with fog, and walked a ways following Indra’s memory, keeping ever to the shadow, largely unspeaking. When they had perhaps an hour left until moonrise they left the road again and walked through the thick forest as quietly as they could manage in the winter loam. At this southerly latitude there were only scraps of snow left in the darkest hollows and they were colorless and seemed like fallen bodies or like ghosts in the disappearing light. 

“They were camped out,” Indra said, and Remus recognized her voice the way it always was at the very last, a kind of elemental familiarity, “around a bonfire toward the back of this very old cemetery. In a clearing in the trees…” 

It was no matter, he could smell them now, amidst the forest and the rotting leaves, he could taste it, and it moved in his blood, like a black strand of ribbon. Their ghosts on the stairs — at the door — Indra met his eyes and clasped his shoulder. Her nostrils were flared and the yellow spreading in her eyes had begun to eclipse their hazel. 

They undressed and protected their clothes and the backpack with a few spells and tucked them with their wands in the hollow trunk of a wych elm tree. They sat together against the rough skin of the trunk and waited. The wind off the lakes not yet visible in the far valley moved in the trees. He hardly felt the cold nor a single other thing; not the fear, only a sudden wash of bloody certainty. It was right — it would be. That thread of un-himself told him as such and he found he believed it. After all he had shirked his every master long ago in all but name. He had performed every necessary and he had prepared himself with twelve years’ training in the very innermost sanctum of hell. This action undertaken presently was solely the sealing and the closing and the cauterizing of the unhealingest wound. He had severed it like some mistaken limb and now he would burn it shut. Kill the infection, eat the possessor, before it spread, before it seized him again, before it slipped away as it only ever had into the silent distance and the moonlight. 

When he closed his eyes he could nearly see them so close they were he could hear the crackle of their bonfire and feel the heat of it upon his face. It was presided over by the man-thing himself and Remus could smell — could feel — the pitchy sticky blood upon the wolf’s snout and its black nose and the breath and the hands — the sick spreading smile in the wood and the eyes that pierced and pinned him and saw him for what they thought he was and stuck for years in his dreams eyes glowing in the wild darkness. The breath and the the room — the attic window, and the sea. The sound of the breath, the heartbeat, the hand upon his belly, the blood upon the stone, the face in the door. The screaming in the hallway.

When they came for him inside themselves they all looked the same. They had offered him every poison possibility they could muster because they thought they knew what he needed to be in order to live in this world. They did not — could not — understand that even at the worst it had ever been he had had every independent capability to survive. _Which is the mastership of oneself which is the pinioned bird taking flight again northward…_ Which was what he had inherited from Greyback on the moor in ’65 — what he had inherited from his parents on the night in the cottage they held dishtowels to his wounds and he was not crying — what he had inherited from James who came and sat in his carriage on the Hogwarts Express smiling asking no questions carrying his little monogrammed suitcase with his hair already mussed — what he had inherited from Sirius who had made such fucking huge mistakes, who had nearly ruined him more than once but who waited with him nevertheless, every moon night, who waited even when he couldn’t speak anymore, who waited as his bones stretched, as his skin turned inside out, who was there with him, in the morning, the first thing he saw when he woke up — 

Who was with him as ever, always, the presence which touched his hair and kissed his face, and he recalled he had told Sirius as such in the letter, which when he returned home — when he crossed again the threshold — he would certainly have to burn, _I don’t think I ever told you there is a piece of you like a ghost or a memory that is with me all the time and was with me in Azkaban I could feel you sometimes and I know it was you. I don't know but I figure you would have told me something if you were oneiromancing me and so I’m chalking it up to magic I suppose, can’t you feel this, like there is something between us that won’t ever break? Like an iron chain. Like even when either of us has tried to break it which certainly we both have we can’t break it because it isn’t meant to be broken. It is so much bigger and stronger than the two of us and sometimes I don’t think it’s even about you and me at all but something larger even if I can’t say what that is. So really death isn’t the worst thing that has come between us. And so really I am always there with you and if you listen and wait you will find me. I swear I know it more than I know anything else that you will find me._

He felt the moon wash up from beneath the horizon and the rising pitch and cadence of Indra’s breaths and he longed for it, reached into it, wrapped it up and around himself like its own alien resonance, and he could feel beating alongside his heart the other self screaming forth in ecstasy of howling — 

_Relinquo servitutem. Et Libertas Mea._

He trusted it more than he thought he ever had in his life before, and he was not afraid. When he welcomed it at last he felt its joy. Far from the woods beyond before it snatched his consciousness he heard them calling to the omnipresent night. 

\--

Dawn cast a bolt of butter lightning under his eyelids. Benediction, baptism, rebirth, unbirth. At the surface he breathed. 


	15. Chapter 15

A man and a woman boarded the night train in Doncaster smelling of iron and something burnt and presented to the conductor one-way tickets to Fort William. Odd people rode the night train and the conductors who often shared sips from a fifth of gin in the emptier cars relished customers who were not screaming drunk, strung out, or manic on PCP or otherwise. Both of the passengers were tall and hollow about the eyes, but they were not siblings and neither did they comport themselves like a couple. They sat across from one another in a berth and did not touch and took turns sleeping. When they boarded the train the woman had been carrying a fluorescent hiker's backpack that seemed heavy not in weight but with something else. Now it occupied the empty seat next to the man who made very certain he did not touch it even while he slept, which he did fitfully, snatches of it here and there through the night hours, and otherwise he watched out the window at the featureless black blur. 

He woke her up at dawn with a hand on her wrist. She yawned, showing the fillings in her molars (they were not silver) and the jagged sharpness of her canine teeth. His hand on her wrist was vivid with bones and tattooed with old marks and raw red at the knuckles and there was blood under the ragged fingernails. 

The conductor from his seat watched them curiously as he appreciated stories he could share with his family over breakfast and with his friends at the pub and once he had casually overheard human smugglers planning a job and had received for his tip to the police a 500 pound reward. 

The woman looked out the window at the night pulling away. "Almost there," she said; her voice was hoarse and soft. 

"The next station," said the man. 

She could not yet be fifty, and he could not yet be forty, but something about them was eerily ageless. He wondered if they were hikers out to climb Ben Nevis, or if they were starting one of the national trails, but if so it was rather curious that they only carried between them one backpack. 

"Did you sleep?" she asked him. 

"A little." 

"I'm going to sleep," she said, "for a week, after this. I'm going to eat my weight in fish and chips and then I'm going to sleep for a week." 

He smiled at her weakly but sincerely and she smiled back the same. When she shifted back in her seat and rearranged her fur wrap he saw for the first time in the new daylight the bruising on her face and collar and the raggedness — the bloodiness — of her hands as well, which were missing two manicured nails. The man was bruised too, and when he stretched the sleep out of his long limbs the conductor saw under the sleeves of his coat deep furrowed scratches that might have been put there by teeth or claws. The scar across the man's face which the conductor noticed now for the first time was of a similar origin but very old. 

"Have you ever climbed a mountain before," the man asked the woman, and she laughed, and her laugh was like a bark.

"Remus," she said, "this is not a mountain. Don't you realize if we were doing this in Nepal or Tibet we'd have to climb Everest?" 

He laughed too but his was smaller, like a huff. "I hadn't thought of that." 

"Or if we were in America, after this we would have to go to Death Valley." 

"I've wanted to, though." 

"Yes, well maybe after all this we — all of us can. Keith can probably find us a cheap flight because you know his Da works at Heathrow and I can get the kids out of school and you can bring Sirius. Rather would be a special vacation." 

"I wonder how much is buried there." 

She had a way of looking at him like an older sister would. Like she loved him but they had seen different evidence of the world’s worst machinations. "Things are buried everywhere," she said. 

"I suppose."

She turned to the window to watch the dawn. The rime of the moon just a night past full. "This happens to us on every inch of earth." 

"Not," he said, carefully, like he was worried he might make it untrue, "not to us, anymore." 

"I hope. God I really do hope." 

When the train slowed they both stood almost gingerly and the woman helped the man get the backpack on and he buckled the straps across his narrow chest and they waited together at the door leaning against the railing. "Almost there," said the man. 

"Yes," she said, "almost there." 

When the doors opened they nodded goodbye to the conductor and they went out together into the new sunshine split through clouds and moving like the eye of God upon the tarn, as though just born. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you so much for sticking with this insane behemoth all the way through to to the end. writing this was a labor of love, i'm so glad it exists now, and i'm so thankful for all your support!!  
> endless thanks be due to [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse), midwife/beta/cheerleader of this monstrosity without whom i never could have written this.  
> if you think there's an element of this story i should tag / warn for, but have missed, please let me know! i am happy to oblige.  
> [here on my tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/tagged/atomizer) are some reference points / inspiration bits for this series - join me! also, feel free to message me with regard to this story and/or call me out on anything i've gotten wrong.  
> 


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